In my post on the American ruling class’s contempt for the American middle-class, a lot of you said it was always thus. Was it, though? Was there always a feeling that they didn’t need the American middle-class, that they could make their money elsewhere? Did the national media always consist entirely of unabashed ruling class members/cheerleaders?
I’ve only been following stuff since about 1996, so I have no idea.
stuckinred
The Hampton Tea Partay
kdaug
Rises and falls. 1880-1930, yes. 1930-1980, no. 1980-now, yurp.
one two seven
So, we’ve got about 20 more years of this?
TenguPhule
Was there always a feeling that they didn’t need the American middle-class
-This has been your grammar correction for today.
Phoebe
I don’t understand this sentence. Is it missing “need to screw over”? Also, could you link to the post to which you refer? I would like to go there instantly, without having to hunt for it. Thanks.
j low
@TenguPhule:
Fixed.
Comrade DougJ
@Phoebe:
I think it’s supposed to be poor form to link to your own posts, it’s about three posts down from the current post on the page.
joe from Lowell
No, it was not always thus. Henry Ford’s observation that his auto workers needed to be able to afford his cars was dominant until, perhaps, the 1980s.
joeyess
No, it wasn’t always like this. This began with the advent of the Heritage Foundation/Federalist Society’s infection of the GOP. Blame the right-wing think tanks and Frank Luntz’s mendacious hypnosis.
When this is all ironed out – many years from now and long after I’ve shuffled off of this mortal coil – I would rest in peace in the knowledge that congressional hearing were being convened and the first question asked of all the witnesses would be: “Have you now, or have you ever been a member of The Federalist Society?”
joe from Lowell
Certainly, the Enlightenment thinkers who founded this country and the generations that followed them understood the need for broad prosperity. See, for instance, the Homestead Act.
Turgidson
My not-expert opinion of this is that the elite probably always had nothing but contempt of the middle class, but until Ronaldus Maximus’s reign of awesome and the globalization/neoliberal/Washington consensus era, they were hestitant to just say so openly and nakedly pursue the policies that would destroy it. Now, they’re more or less out in the open about it because they can get away with it.
Davis X. Machina
This is The Golden Age of Thread Titles….
Maude
There was a change in the media with cable tv and talk radio syndication.
The media started to almost fall into line with the rightie talkers instead of reporting. When media types started to become celebrities, the amount of work they di went down. Thinking seemed to be bad thing for some of the MSM.
Reagan really changed attitudes in the US. The rich were the cream of the crop and everyone else was the great unwashed. The class system deepened and the income differences started to widen. Now it is obvious that all of us who aren’t rich. But it happened over time. It is so much harder to make ends meet than it was before Reagan.
With Reagan, being ignorant, stupid and mediocre became fashionable.
It has gotten worse since the 1980’s and the 1990’s saw the freeing of Wall Street from those pesky regulators and it really started being acceptable to disparage the poor without being castigated.
matryoshka
I think class antagonism has been one of the most deeply denied facets of the American psyche. Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States made a pretty good case for this, if you want to explore the idea in long form.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
i think the belief has always been more, that they could bend and manipulate the middle class to their will..
that they were obviously the ones for whom society existed.
for a long time, until the end of ww2, they were the only ones that mattered, the ones that society at large needed to emulate, they were the stars, the celebrities, the pinnacle was to be like old money and the smart set.
they saw that the middle class didn’t dream of being old money, they just dreamed of money. the more the middle class became influential in “pop”culture, and pop culture as such superceded high culture, they felt they lost their specialness, if not their power.
they want it all, the money, the power, and the envy, and this group is just ham-handed and stupid in how they go about it, that is all that has changed. the elites are simply not as good at being elite as they used to be.
kdaug
@one two seven: Dunno, but don’t think so – the internet is a big catalyst. It does feel like it’s on the downward slope a bit early. People who wouldn’t be thinking about this before, are.
And people are getting pissed.
Linnaeus
I’m of the view that, yes, it has “always been this way” in that there’s long been class conflict between the working classes (broadly speaking) and the upper/ruling classes. The intensity of that conflict has waxed and waned, and there have been strategic accommodations between classes at times, but the basic opposition of interests hasn’t gone away.
dan
From the 1957 movie. Faces in the crowd. It has always been this way. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edpz9f5LVaY&feature=share
matryoshka
@joe from Lowell: The Homestead Act and Henry Ford were more motivated by capitalism than generosity of spirit.
Rick Massimo
I think it’s always bene this way; it’s just that in the last 20 years it’s been much more possible to carry it out. And the media weren’t always their cheerleaders. This, of course, is now known as “pervasive liberal media bias” that the media have spent the past 30 years “making up for,” which not surprisingly hasn’t been enough.
Roger Moore
@joe from Lowell:
The Homestead act is better seen as an example of how complex the situation was. It was something the Whigs and later Republicans had been pushing for a long time, but it was very unpopular among Southerners and was consistently blocked by the Democrats. It- and a whole bunch of other progressive* legislation- were finally passed during the Civil War because the obstructionists had seceded and weren’t around in Congress to block it.
*That’s small “p” progressive.
Mandramas
It depends, because it is a question of degree.
Marxist theory says that every society always have a class warfare context; it varies the intensity and the means to the production is executed (it is not the same the borgoise that aristocracy, serf that slave or paid workers, etc). Class is a construct defined by the assumption of a conflict.
In American history, the great shift probably happened after The Gildren Age, when the upper class became scared due to the example of Russian revolution, and a extensive colectivism and organized labor importance. Also, it a was a moment where the labor can really hurt the economy if they want. A nationalism undercurrent in the world reduce the amount of global trade, forcing America to create a entire goods market by itself (it means, no offshoring and no foreign markets). A explosion of industrial productivity means that the Factories are more important that ever. Finally, the worlds wars needed a lot of patriotic people willing to kill and to be killed for their country. With this bets on the stake, the upper class conceded a lot of middle class favoring laws. They hoped to save Capitalism, and regain their losses some day. This day has come.
Brachiator
This book title says it all: Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. HW Brands’ book shows how the mercantile elite learned nothing from the Depression and went after FDR with everything they had.
Linnaeus
It should also be kept in mind that the Homestead Act was a redistribution of land from indigenous peoples to settler-farmers.
AnonGuest84
The rich certainly needed the middle class when a living, breathing alternative to their political & economic system existed over in Russia and China.
But now that ‘everybody knows’ that any and all alternatives to Our Free Market Capitalist System are like a bad case of venereal disease…. not so much.
joe from Lowell
@matryoshka:
The subject of the post is not “generosity of spirit,” but rather, whether the economic elite considered it to be in their interest to have a strong middle class.
Nylund
The ruling class needed workers, so they had to at least engage the workers in some form of negotiation. The workers were also customers, and so there was some need to keep them paid well-enough to buy the products they made. Plus, communism was a true threat and there was a need to keep the masses happy enough to not start a Trotsky/Lenin revolution.
The threat of communism has passed, workers can easily (and more cheaply) be found abroad, and, as long as they keep handing out credit cards like candy, Americans can still buy their goods (even if its just with money they don’t have).
As such, yes, the rich probably have less need for the middle class now than they did at various points in the past.
This reminds me of a question. Having never read Atlas Shrugs, can someone explain to me who did all the manual labor in Galt’s Gulch? I think the chick worked at Galt’s maid for a bit, but obviously that wasn’t going to be the ongoing answer. I doubt she’d give up her “railroad tycoon” status just to dust the furniture of her rapist.
Kaleb
One thing that helps immensely with selling this idea beyond the top 1% is the delusion shared by the rest of the top 25% or so that they are themselves middle-class. With the “c” word so radioactive, these people want to think of themselves as in the middle (with aspirations), and therefore the things that they want in order to grow their small fortunes must be good for the middle class in general. This leads to hilariously stupid things like my local morning talk-radio host saying “If you think $250,000 a year is a lot of money, then you are just out of touch.”
joe from Lowell
@Roger Moore: But the doctrine that the Homestead Act itself embodied – the idea of making land in the west available to middle- and lower-class people so that they could improve their situation and, in doing so, improve that of the nation as a whole – runs through federal policy from the very beginning. For instance, the land in the Louisiana Purchase was to be made available to ordinary people for that purpose.
dollared
@Brachiator: This. Not only Marx was right, but so was JK Galbreath. The right lingered as those 10% of prep schoolers/frat boys who turned into Federalist Society Lawyers and Chicago School MBAs, but then metastisized when Ronald Reagan made hating working people fashionable again. Since then, it’s been dismantle-all-countervailing-institutions.
Think how clearly that is happening in the states – kill the public sector unions, restructure municipal governments, kill the public universities. It’s all about giving the wealthy a monopoly on power.
I just listened to an ESPN sportstalkradio guy talk about winning a tennis tournament at his country club in his youth. When I was younger, no public personality, especially on sports radio, would have admitted a country club upbringing. Now….
Legalize
I think the ruling class believed that it needed the middle class to make a buck until it realized that it could cut its overhead by going overseas. The ruling class wasn’t allowed to have slaves over here any more, so they just went where the action was.
joe from Lowell
@Mandramas:
Marxist theory puts the interests of the middle class on the same side as that of the rich, and views the theorized monopolization of wealth in fewer and fewer hands as a self-destructive tendency among the capital-owning class(es), rather than as an expression of the wealthy waging war against the middle class.
Villago Delenda Est
As long as the Soviet Union remained an “existential threat”, the American ruling class had to play nice.
Once they were gone, the threat was gone, and it was party all the time on the backs of the lower 99%.
MonkeyBoy
@Comrade DougJ:
No, it is considered good form to link to your post that you are referring to. This helps people who come to this post by a link rather than from the front page not have to do the work of figuring out what you are referring to.
The Moar You Know
Galtian Masters of the Universe can WILL money into being, since they are Men Of The Mind. In other words, yes.
Mostly. There have been brief periods when that wasn’t the case, usually due to some upstart news organization’s CEO wanting to take his place amongst the Galtian Masters of the Universe and being willing to stir up a little class resentment to move enough papers/TV ads to get there.
See also:
Murdoch, Rupert
Moulitsas, Markos
Huffington, Ariana
Turner, Ted
etc. Waste of time if you ask me. Hearst got there just fine and never did anything but work for the Galtian Masters of the Universe.
joe from Lowell
@Linnaeus:
Which is a fine point, but has nothing to do with the subject of the relations between the middle and upper classes.
Another fine point, which also has nothing to do with the subject of the post, which is the relations between the upper and middle classes, not working or poor classes.
Lev
The media didn’t always use to be so one-sided for the right. Iran-Contra was, in my opinion, a shining moment for them. It’s easy to forget that Reagan’s Administration was in complete disarray after that: he lost Bork, chickened out on Bob Dole’s spending cuts, and just listed in office for his last two years. There’s a reason why Hart (and later Dukakis) started out with 20-point leads over H.W. Bush in the polls.
Nowadays, though, it’s just business sense to go from the right. Old people are really the only ones who watch cable news, and they’re largely conservative. Granted, most of them watch FOX, but CNN doesn’t get it. MSNBC seems to have tried to target old liberals, with limited success. It’s tough because there’s not too many of them.
David in NY
@dan: I’ve been feeling for some time that we were reliving “A Face in the Crowd,” and that, this time, there was not going to be a happy ending.
Interesting that the only two movies I can recall that cast the rich in the role of political manipulators in America were “A Face in the Crowd” and “Meet John Doe.” Seems to me that in the latter, some rich Fascist had his own SS motorcycle troops on parade. Were there any others?
Mandramas
@joe from Lowell: Indeed. In fact, probably Marx was thinking in early industrial societies, where the Gini index as very low, and there are no functional middle class; only capitalist and proletariat. Further analysis, post welfare state, did highlighted middle class role as a social in-between buffer that can side with upper or lower classes, depending of ideology and economical-political context. On America, it was sided almost universally with upper class.
joe from Lowell
Discussing the proletariat and the petit bourgeoisie as if they were the same thing = MarxistFAIL.
A close follower of Marx would identify such confusion as a form of false consciousness.
matryoshka
@joe from Lowell: Well, if you can make the case that Henry Ford and the Homestead Act are proof that the rich in earlier decades saw the need for a thriving middle class, go ahead and do it.
jeff
Why does S&P downgrade US Debt under a Dem right before elections, when nothing has changed from the situation under Bush (except the recession continued)?
New Yorker
Henry Ford was already mentioned as a counter-example of a wealthy oligarch who understood the need for a vibrant middle class, so no, it hasn’t always been like this. Hell, even the GOP gave up on trying to destroy the New Deal for a while (check out any Eisenhower quotes on this).
I think this is the result of the “southernization” of the GOP since the civil rights era. One could argue (and I do) that the Civil War was a fight to preserve a feudal caste system against the creeping liberalism of the American republic. But with the lost causers now in charge of an entire political party, they can try to re-establish their dreams of a feudal society built on the ruins of a republic.
I’ve heard the joke that Henry Ford paid his workers well enough to afford Ford automobiles, while Wal-Mart pays its employees so little that they can’t afford to shop anywhere but Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is a southern company, Ford is/was not.
Ash Can
Like Maude @ #13 says, attitudes changed in the Reagan era. Reagan and his administration basically told the country it was OK to stop being concerned about anyone but yourself, that you didn’t have to share, that you didn’t need to be concerned about your neighbors. Remember, this was the time when MBAs came into fashion. Before that, it was law school that was in fashion, especially for women — empowerment through government, through the rule of law. MBAs were for people focused on managing businesses. In the 80s, however, MBAs became all the rage, and for a different reason. MBA students were focused on making money for themselves first and foremost, with business management just being a means to do that rather than being an end in and of itself. Mike Milken didn’t tell the MBA graduating class of some big-time university (I think it was Yale) in the 80s “Seek wealth; it’s OK” for nothing. Class resentments and friction have always been around, but attitudes certainly have changed over the past 30 years.
MikeJ
@MonkeyBoy: Agreed. If you cite it, link it. Citing yourself and being too “modest” to link it is just stupid.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Mandramas:
well…the day has also come where freemarket capitalism is exposed as a fraud.
In a way…the 300 million Americans became the whole worlds upper class/predator class.
My friend shore usta say that the people of the world saw America as a ginormous maw, consuming everything.
joe from Lowell
@Mandramas: Indeed. Furthermore, devout Marxists opposed, as “ameliorationist,” the very policies that created the middle class, because they allowed increasing numbers of would-be-immiserated proletarians to live reasonably comfortable lives even in societies in which a wealthy class continued to exist.
Roger Moore
I think it’s a mistake to treat the upper class as monolithic. There have always been ones who wanted to treat the lower classes as scum and ones who were more sympathetic. I think that’s why you have dismissive descriptions of limousine liberals and Coastal Liberal Elites. Those are basically the upper class people who don’t want to blow off the lower classes, and they get special contempt from the Confederate Party elitists who do.
David in NY
@Villago Delenda Est: Yes, unions and communism (or the fear that the unions would become communist) kept the rich in line for about 30 years. I’ve always thought that the communists (abroad and at home) were probably the main facilitators of the Civil Rights movement, because in the propaganda wars of the Cold War era, we were looking really bad.
My wife, just reading a history of the Freedom Rides, reminded me that the Kennedy’s were really pissed off about them, because Jack was about to go to some summit, and he really didn’t want to be asked why he allowed the Southerners to kick the shit out of unarmed, non-violent protesters, seeking simple compliance with the Supreme Court’s decision of 15 years before.
For similar reasons, the rich couldn’t use their economic power to restrict wages too much, lest they end up looking too much like the fat cats in the Daily Worker cartoons, dollar signs on their suits and all. Remember in those days, Charlie Wilson of GM got in trouble for saying that what was good for America was good for GM “and vice versa.”
Mandramas
@joe from Lowell: Well, those devout marxist are truly assholes.
joe from Lowell
@matryoshka:
Is this a joke? It’s like “challenging” me to prove that water is wet. This isn’t a theory; it’s a fact.
Henry Ford wrote specifically about the need for his workers, and industrial workers generally, to be able to afford his automobiles if his enterprise was to be successful. You need only have a passing familiarity with his writings, or with his history of paying above-market wages for his labor, to understand this.
Similarly, the Homestead Act and its predecessor policies were deliberately imposed for the purpose of providing an opportunity for an agrarian class of yeoman farmers to become the dominant segment of the American population.
I don’t even know how to answer this question; it’s like you’ve asked me to prove that someone who set up a radio station wanted to broadcast radio programming. You only need to know what the Homestead Act and Henry Ford’s labor policies were in order to understand that they are as I’ve described them.
Maybe that would be a good place to start: read the Wikipedia pages on Henry Ford and the Homestead Act. The thing speaks for itself.
kdaug
@Lev:
And “I can’t remember” 75 times in the Iran-Contra hearings.
And the announcement he had Alzheimer’s shortly after leaving office.
He was a superb puppet.
Roger Moore
@joe from Lowell:
That may have been the idea, but it was badly implemented because the Southern planter did their best to obstruct it. That’s my point: there have always been rich assholes who wanted to screw over the little guy, and they’ve been a major force in our government from the very beginning.
Mandramas
@Roger Moore: It is not monolitism, it is that sometimes the average ideology have a trend to one side or to another.
joe from Lowell
@New Yorker:
Good point! Because the “southernization of the GOP” is also the splitting of the south from the New Deal coalition.
Linnaeus
@joe from Lowell:
It does in the sense that, if we’re arguing that the Homestead Act aimed to achieve broad prosperity, it was less broad in the sense that a class of people were excluded from this by being moved off their own land.
This is why I said “broadly speaking”, because we’re talking about class in the American social, political, and economic context. The American tendency is to assign class status by income (though this is by no means to say that there aren’t other class markers in American society), so you get the phenomenon of people who are working-class in terms of what they do, but achieve lower- to middle-middle class standing by virtue of their income.
ericblair
@jeff: Remind me why this herd of microcephalic bought and paid for whores aren’t in jail for fraud right now? Also, please tell me who put them up to this little stunt, because for the past few years they couldn’t take a piss without an ibanker to tell them which urinal to use.
kdaug
@Ash Can:
And he proved “Deficits don’t matter”. (Thank you, Mr. Cheney. I won’t forget.)
Brachiator
@stuckinred: A very cool parody of the useless rich
Rich People Things
joe from Lowell
@matryoshka:
Let me take another crack at this: the wealth wrote the Homestead Act. When they did so, they wrote it in a way that forbade those extraordinary wealth from “homesteading” gigantic estates to be worked by large numbers of “peasants,” but divided the land up into parcels just the right size for a family to settle, work itself, and produce enough of a surplus to support what was then a middle class lifestyle. They could have written that law in a manner that doled out super-large parcels of land to those who could establish gigantic plantations, but they didn’t. They could have imposed entry barriers to homesteading land that would have excluded those not already wealthy, but they didn’t. They could have monopolized that land themselves – after all, they had both the wealth and the political power to do so – but they didn’t. Indeed, in an age when owning property was the barrier for exercising political power (pre-Homestead Act, but certainly post-the beginning of American encouragement of western settlement), they began pushing for policies that allowed poor and working people who had no land to acquire it.
Seriously, I find myself a bit wrong-footed being asked to prove something as obvious as the notion that the promotion of yeoman farming was meant to foster yeoman farmers.
Mnemosyne
I blame globalization. It made the rich think that they don’t need a United States. They can get everything they need from other countries — cheap labor, luxurious living, new markets, etc. — so they see no reason to make sure the middle class in the US can afford their goods and services. If the US middle class can’t, there’s a growing middle class in China and India that will be happy to buy.
(I don’t agree with them, BTW, but I do think that’s the rationale.)
Jim Pharo
This may have been covered upthread, but what’s different today is that it is the first time in our history when we have not relied on either de jure or de facto slavery. Without a large class of people to consign to the bottom-most rung of our economy, we have lost a tool that allowed the others to get further along.
I also think it’s a mistake to anthropomorphize the elites. My guess is that the vast bulk of “the elites” thinking, etc., is the by-product of a kind of bias. For example, if I am rich I’m more likely to think I deserve to be rich because, after all, I’m a good guy. Which means that those who have little deserve their fate, whether because they are evil, or have simply made bad decisions. This introduces a kind of cultural bias without any person or group setting out to make this value real in society.
My answer is “twas always thus,” and that the period leading up to the Second World War and thereafter was quite aberrational. I wonder how that post-war period would be remembered if Americans learned more about how devastated most of the rest of the world was for a decade or two. When one takes that fact fully on-board, suddenly the post-war boom doesn’t look like anything other than a victory lap…
joe from Lowell
@Villago Delenda Est:
This can actually be seen as an echo of the earlier elites’ use of western land as a safety valve for the growing cohorts of urban poor and working classes in eastern cities.
joe from Lowell
@Mandramas:
After a certain point, yes. I could see how a devout Marxist in, say, 1887 could believe that the promise of a broad middle class was a fraud, the raising up of a selected few to a position of petty privilege, intended to foster division among the working class. Indeed, the bosses used to use this technique all the time.
But by, say, 1950, they were just assholes.
joe from Lowell
@Roger Moore: An excellent point, Roger, as if your identification of the split among elites as having a North/South dimension.
Jay C
@Kaleb:
It isn’t just the “delusion” of the “Top 25%” that they are “middle class”; it’s an oddity of American sociology that virtually everyone (and the poll numbers are something like 80% [?]) describes themselves as “middle class” – ranging from pretty much everyone on the lower end who isn’t actually a pauper on welfare, up to the undeniably affluent. “Rich” and “Poor” are considered extremely limited categories in this country – when polled, people’s guesses as to the actual percentages and distribution of income in the US are usually wildly inaccurate.
And as to the”was it always this way?” question: IMO, no. There have always been class frictions here, and they have flared up/died down off and on throughout our history: but I think they have become sharper in recent years. Partly because the current population over 30 was born and brought up into a relatively anomalous period of widespread prosperity and opportunity (roughly 1945-1980). Economic conditions changed after 1980 – they were not helped by the official adoption of seriously warped economic theories beginning in the Reagan Admin.; but “Reaganomics” per se didn’t (IMO) cause the decline in the “economy of opportunity” – it just exacerbated the downsides (loss of the manufacturing sector, the rise of the FIRE sector, etc.) .
Dan
I’ve always felt ignored, which I could deal with. It is something new to be despised. And why? It really is a WTF moment.
Dennis SGMM
Another excellent thread.
After paying attention to the dynamics of this country from the mid-Sixties on, I agree with those who have written that inter-class antagonism has always been one of our dirty little secrets. The myth that “All men are created equal,” is the bullshit that has pretty much kept us from having a rational discussion of the antagonism and it is still so pervasive that even though the wealthiest have declared open war on the rest of us it is still somehow un-American to even acknowledge the demonstrable fact of the assault.
In short, we (Those of us not on top) will continue to be incrementally fucked over for the foreseeable future.
joe from Lowell
@Linnaeus:
But the vision of a broad middle class was never universal, never leveling. The question here is whether there was to be a middle class of any significant size at all, vs. a feudal system of extremes of wealth and poverty. The desire to expand the middle class and make it the majority, so obviously present in the Homestead Act, doesn’t vanish because of a belief that there would be some people outside of it.
But doesn’t this just prove, along with the efforts made to increase that income, that there was a desire among the elite to have a middle class, to have a situation in which poor people could become non-poor people (that is, middle class people)?
1. People aren’t locked into the lower classes by birth, as in Europe of that day.
2. Policies like the Homestead Act or Henry Ford’s wage scale are designed to ensure that people aren’t locked into the lower classes by virtue of not having opportunity to make money, but can have their own farms and their own cars, even if they are just ordinary working class folk.
Bob Loblaw
No, of course not. But you’re acting like globalization isn’t real, like it’s all some ruse to trick the American middle class into poverty.
Capital is going to associate with other capital. It isn’t necessarily bound by borders or tribes. Especially not when elite higher education is so concentrated into a handful of institutions. Data transfer is global and instantaneous. This isn’t some Friedman “the world is flat” bullshit, but it’s an inescapable reality that America isn’t the last, best place to do business on earth anymore.
The United States is, in a lot of ways, a venture capital firm for the rest of the planet. It will require a real paradigm shift to get American business to focus on a broad, shared, nationalistic investment strategy.
Comrade DougJ
@Dan:
Bingo, that’s how I feel too.
Jay C
@joe from Lowell:
Is this really true? IIRC from my AmHist101, the “yeoman farmers” who homesteaded in the West tended to be more of the poorer sort of the rural class: mainly the less-successful (or “excess” children of) farming types from the “Old Midwest” (Ohio, Indiana, etc.)i.e., those who were already farmers: the Eastern “urban poor and working class” tended, rather, to migrate into industrial and/or service work where they were. And, if they were lucky enough to prosper, suburbanized themselves in one way or another as soon as they were able to.
Mnemosyne
@Jim Pharo:
What do you think illegal immigrants are other than our new slaves? When Colorado passed one of the toughest anti-immigrant laws in the country, they had to start using prisoners to do farm work because no one else could legally do it at the wages the farms were paying.
dollared
@Mnemosyne: This is exactly right. Marxian analysis works here too: the High Bourgeoisie lost the battle in the US in the ’30s-70’s, and so they aligned with powerful elites outside the US to create the GATT/WTT trade system, and opened the floodgates to immigration.
Now there is the Global Business Class, and they are winning the battle. And they don’t give shit about the United States, period, except as a market.
joe from Lowell
@Linnaeus: Put another way, Linnaeus, Jefferson, Hamilton, the authors of the Homestead Act, and Henry Ford were working to expand the middle class. Our modern Galtian overlords are working to reduce it.
Jim Pharo
@Mnemosyne: I concur wholeheartedly, but the scale is drastically less. And I agree that we have agricultural and other workers here that are in de facto slavery even to this day, plus the pressure to put the prisoners to work will only increase (de jure slavery).
burnspbesq
Yes, we have always been at war with East Hampton, except for those times when we have always been at war with Eur Hampton.
joe from Lowell
@Jay C:
1. Plenty of those “urban poor” in the era of, say, 1790-1880, were actually immigrants who’d been farmers in the old country, or people who’s fathers had been farmers and had been driven off the land.
2. If you look at Jefferson, the biggest proponent of the yeoman farmer, he supported allowing as many people as possible to own their own farms specifically for the purpose of avoiding the development of an urban society based on industrialism.
3. The industrial revolution was already in full swing when the Homestead Act was signed into law in 1862. Providing would-be urban poor with another option was very much in the minds of its supporters.
VERBERNE
1840-1914 Industrial Revolution – Gilded Age, Upton Sinclair’s the Jungle. Dog eat dog world where the Rich could care less about the “masses”.
1914-1994 The Progressive Movement – Anti-Trust laws and outlawing Child Labor. Labor union growth until Taft-Harley in 1946. The economy needed a strong middle class to be the engine of American Prosperity.
1994-Present NAFTA, SUBSEQUENTLY THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION; THEY NO LONGER NEED THE MIDDLE CLASS TO BE THE ECONOMIC ENGINE SINCE THEY EXPORTED ALL THE MANUFACTURING JOBS OVERSEAS, FIRST TO MEXICO, LATER TO CHINA OR OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD THAT PAY CHEAPER WAGES.
p.a.
And we’ve always been allied with Chevy Chase…
For some time I’ve been coming to around to the uncomfortable belief expressed above that the necessity to
defeatoutlast the USSR explains the middle class ‘golden age’ from WWII through LBJ. The first buttresses to the edifice were knocked out under Nixon, (well, really Taft-Hartley in what ’47? ’49?) and the rest is like watching a rising tide wash away sand castles.Interesting that the US economy now seems to run on a series of bogus bubbles and half-assed recoveries. Is American capitalism a failure without the USSR to encourage wealth distribution? Even the Military-Industrial-(Congressional) Complex is pushing automation and reducing the need for manpower. Good for preserving American lives, good for increasing the reserve army of unemployed.
WereBear
I can’t see how they care about it even as a market; they don’t want to pay wages that will allow people to buy things.
Jim Pharo
@joe from Lowell: I don’t think Henry Ford gave a crap about creating any class other than a class of buyers of his products. This is EJ Dionne’s point today: the failure to assure economic well-being to a large-enough swath of Americans is imperiling the elite’s own well-being. Who exactly do they think will be buying all these houses, cars and iPads? For now, they’re happy selling to a global elite, but that market will not be enough to sustain them. They really do need us.
dollared
@joe from Lowell: I’m with you on this. It was a staggering piece of social engineering, right down to allocating some land to a free public school and then some land to support its operating expenses.
Contrast Brazil and you have (IMHO) the single biggest reason for US development versus Latin America. In Brazil, the king of Portugal drew 11 parallel lines across the entire country and gave all the land from the Atlantic to the Andes to 12 families, divided by those horizontal lines. That’s it – all the assets of the state gone and divided up and privately owned, with no preconditions, forever.
The Northwest Ordinance was truly amazing stuff.
dollared
@WereBear: They do – in one year increments. The Global Business Class isn’t paid to think more than six quarters into the future. So if they can help the US peasants borrow against their land to buy more shit, then OK. Not their problem to worry about how it gets paid back.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Mandramas:
It would be nice if someday we could have a thorough discussion on this blog of The Shield of Achilles, wherein Philip Bobbitt lays out his hypothesis that the growth of mass political participation (whether small-d democratic or via one of the totalitarian movements of the 20th Cen) had a bicausal relationship with the advent of short service mass conscripted infantry as the most effective form of military force. Governments needed people, and lots of them, to be ready and willing to fight on short notice, and the social contracts came to reflect that, or else the forms of govt (such as true monarchism) which were unable or unwilling to adapt went under.
Which raises the troubling issue of the relationship between mass participatory democracy today and our increasingly early-18th century style long-service volunteer high-tech military.
Shoemaker-Levy 9
It’s hard to answer your question because it contains some pretty broad implicit assumptions. All social progress in this country has been resisted by the ruling class. Historical circumstance got us a few decades of government filled with New Deal and Great Society democrats, who didn’t spearhead much of this progress but were less likely to stand in its way. In short, I don’t think the Oligarchy are fundamentally different people now than they ever were, it’s just that constraints upon them ebb and flow with history. Does this help?
Martin
Interesting Mother Jones article explaining what we’ve always known.
Dennis SGMM
@dollared:
The problem with that strategy is that we’re losing our attractiveness as a market. With high unemployment, stagnant wages and our inability to convert our hallucinatory home equity into spending cash we are no longer courtesans to be courted, we are the desperate junkies giving ten dollar standups in the alley. “They” don’t need us, our votes or our approval any more.
Edit: I see that werebear beat me to it and did so more succinctly as well.
transmaniacon
@jeff:
The same reason that employment hasn’t been keeping pace with a steady increase in corporate profits since late 2009.
bemused
I think it’s always been the same. The difference is how much power the ruling class are able to acquire, are allowed to aquire, to rape and pillage the rest of us and the planet. We are living in a run amok cycle now and I don’t know how or if it can be broken.
Bob Loblaw
@transmaniacon:
If by “right before elections,” you two geniuses mean “in the middle of April in a non-election year” then yes.
This flashy PR “downgrade” has nothing to do with partisanship. It has everything to do with forestalling uncertainty in the US, given that the other three major economic loci (Eurozone, China, and Japan) have enough of their own crazy shit going on.
Mandramas
@Dennis SGMM: Hmm, but there are no market replacement yet. I think that Galtians are previewing an age of scarcity and global poverty, and they are doing the only thing they can do: hoard, exploit and prepare for the dark ages. (In fact, they are probably causing it)
Linnaeus
@joe from Lowell:
I definitely agree with you on the latter point. And it’s possible that I’m overlooking some of the wider ramifications of the Homestead Act. I think the reason I brought up, for example, indigenous peoples (which may have not been the best response) is that I tend to see ameliorative/reformist policies as a product of multiple forces (and I’m sure you do too), and the desire of elites to expand the classes below them is a small part of those forces. Elite support for progress always has elite interests at the center, i.e. the elites see their own benefit directly, or they’re defending against possible outcomes they see as worse for them.
Maybe, but I guess it depends on the relative weight one gives to elites’ desire to expand the middle class vis-a-vis the agitation that the classes below them did to compel elites to enact reform. While it’s true that Henry Ford did envision an industrial order that was somewhat different from that of his contemporaries, 1) I’m not sure how much of the “rule” that was, rather than the exception and 2) Ford thought that control of the system ultimately had to be in the hands of himself, hence his vicious opposition to unions and the creation of entire departments to exercise social control over his workforce.
Brachiator
@dollared:
I will grant you Galbreath, who was an economist, but not Marx, who was really a theologian.
There were a lot of working people who loved Ronnie. The trick that he pulled off was in convincing people that public sector folks were not really “working,” but were just sucking on the government teat.
Roger Moore
@joe from Lowell:
Thinking about it more, I think the divide is somewhere along the lines of a merchant vs. planter mentality. A rich merchant sees his wealth in terms of money and business, which he can use to buy the things he wants. More importantly he understands that his business depends on the availability of customers for whatever he’s selling. Merchants want as many people as possible to be able to afford what they’re selling, so they tend to favor general prosperity.
Planters, OTOH, operated on plantations that tried as much as possible to be self contained, and they saw their wealth in terms of land and people. Land and people are both limited resources, so seeing your wealth that way gives you a zero sum view of wealth. Not everyone can control a big plantation because there isn’t enough land for everyone and there aren’t enough people to work it. For a planter to get richer, somebody else has to get poorer. That makes them hate, hate, hate the idea of a prosperous middle class.
Mandramas
@dollared: It is not so simple, I think. England, the british empire, shoehorned Latinamerica as a food and material producer; but US as a industrial partner, a growing place to position risk based market.
The early US elite had a lot of ties with London, providing Britain with risky and profitable ventures, unregulated and tax free banks and a place where to move their own innovative elite, away from the conservative based economy of England. Of course, in a moment the control of the partnership inverted, due the high tech side attained by the Oil Economy in early XX Century.
Shadow's Mom
An article I am reading for a class cites the following concept from Democracy & Capitalism: Property, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought by economists Samuel Bowles (not of Erskine-Bowles fame) and Herbert Gintis. It struck me as relevant to circumstances today in how far we have veered from this premise. I attribute a significant part of the change to the increasing globalization of the wealthiest Americans and corporations who are no longer reliant on the American worker to product profits.
Quote was:
The wealthy no longer make any effort to effect accommodations to ‘everyone else,’ and they have been somewhat successful in promoting the fallacy that there will be an ultimate benefit to everyone if the wealthy keep more. It boggles my brain that anyone at any level of the American middle class still believes that tax cuts for the rich will bring prosperity to anyone except the rich.
joe from Lowell
@Jim Pharo:
Indeed, he came out and said so.
@dollared: Great comment, great comparison. Social engineering – yes, indeed, in the service of a theory whose proponents wrote about it extensively.
demz taters
The ownership class’ attitude toward labor is consistent with their view (and subsequent tragedy) of the commons overall. There’s always a faction that argues against any policy of sustainable use and sadly, they’ve been in ascendance since Nixon.
Dennis SGMM
@Mandramas:
I’m a very minor historian of the so-called dark ages. The economic displacements that took place as a result of the slow collapse of the Roman empire simply led to greater exactions from the peasant class.
I suspect that just as the money has chased cheap labor across the globe so it will chase the exploitable peasants. Sell a thousand iPod knockoffs to a thousand Chinese and you’ve made far more money than selling an affordable sedan to an American consumer.
Judas Escargot
@Bob Loblaw:
When you dig a canal between two bodies of water, you generally need to build in Locks to compensate between differing water levels.
Globalization didn’t do that, at all: It just opened the floodgates between markets at different “levels” (ie prices and wages) without a care for the chaos it would bring.
Love or hate Bill Clinton, on some level he did seem to recognize this, and tried to balance the inevitable fact of globalization with the fact that Us workers can’t just arbitrarily take a pay cut and survive.
Phoebe
@Comrade DougJ:
Ignore this peer pressure! It is excellent form to cater to the convenience of me, the reader, always and forever, uber alles, amen.* And thank you for the fix and the pointer; both very useful!
Answer to question: Yes. Kind of. One would think, “We’re all in this together, don’t they see this? Aren’t they supposed to be smart at least when it comes to protecting their own interests?” Some of them are, some of them aren’t. And some of them are genuinely philanthropic; Andrew Carnegie built public libraries (before the gummint ever did) for his exploited class when it really did not benefit his economic interest. Bread and circuses sure, but libraries? Absolutely not in his interest.
But I digress: interest protection: They are human idiots like most of us. And — MARSHMALLOWS! — they can’t resist the short term grab, even when they see where that’s going to lead. Emotion over brain. It’s the same with global warming, and while that could also be interpreted as “fuck my children and their children, Ima get mine.”, I think it’s more marshmallow-driven crackhead behavior.
*And besides, Sullivan does it (rimshot)!
transmaniacon
@Bob Loblaw:
In what sense was the consensus end of the USA recession “right before elections”?
matryoshka
@joe from Lowell: Dude, calm down and take a deep breath. I’m not a big fan of Wikipedia as a source of knowledge (though it is a quick & handy–but often lacking–reference), but Ford’s long career included union-bashing and overseeing private lives of workers as much as Pullman’s. He did have an unusually broad understanding of how to generate wealth, but it was ultimately HIS wealth, no?
As for the Homestead Act, I offer this:
Suffern ACE
Personally, what is new is that conservative columnists are so openly critical of the white middle class at the moment. It’s not “rich people” – although because our pundits are all rich it sure feels that way. It’s conservatives. I don’t know if the middle is used to that…they’re used to liberals pouncing on them and their wasteful lifestyles and not-so-subtle bigotries. They’re just not used to hearing it from conservatives – these are the salt of the earth taxpayers we’re talking about here. East Hampton of the left has always been at war with Middlebrowton. East Hampton of the right has always pretended in public that they wish they had nothing but admiration for Middlebrowton, the backbone of everything that makes this country great.
joe from Lowell
@Linnaeus:
Sure, sure, I’m not arguing that they were sacrificing or operating out of the kindness of their hearts, but that they perceived their interest as being served by living and doing business in a society with a broad base of wealth – although, as always, these materialist concerns were cloaked (even to them) in an ideological garb about freedom and equality. That’s certainly never changed.
I certainly take your point here. I’m only talking about the actions and desires of elites as the motive force on this thread, because the interests and behavior of elites is the topic of the discussion. I certainly don’t postulate that their actions and interests are the only thing driving history.
Fair enough, but we can certainly say that it would be a great deal more of the exception today.
Right, but doesn’t this just prove my point? Even in a system in which he and the other elites had the power, he still wanted to use that power to foster the growth of the middle class.
VERBERNE
I forgot to mention that the jobs exported all went to countries where these manufacturers could pollute to their hearts content without any repercussions.
dollared
@Brachiator: Yes, but none of those working class people are in charge. The real power is with the same people whose grandparents were outraged by FDR’s betrayal of his class.
Phoebe
@joe from Lowell: I think Henry Ford saw his workers as cattle; he built towns for them to live and everything. My architecture teacher said this was “paternalistic” — I think because the towns were not total slums, but tidy little levittown types of places. I don’t know about that, though; I think he was just a self-interested farmer who was smart enough to give his animals decent incentives to stay on the farm. He couldn’t own them or imprison them.
Linda Featheringill
Interesting thread. Love the smell of class consciousness in the afternoon. And on my day off so I can follow it.
Ahhh, life is good.
joe from Lowell
@matryoshka:
I’m quite calm. One needn’t agree with you to have control of one’s faculties, you know. And if you don’t like Wikipedia, there are plenty of other sources where you can find descriptions of Ford’s thoughts about wages and markets, or the Homestead Act.
Certainly. As I’ve said several times now, this isn’t about the elites of previous eras being less concerned about their own self-interest, but about how they perceived that self-interest in relation to the existence of a large middle class.
First, you don’t find the distribution of eighty million acres of land that could have been monopolized by the wealthy to ordinary people a rather significant accomplishment? Second, why highlight one set of years and not another? Except for the land that was distributed to ordinary people, and except for the years when most of it was distributed to ordinary people, most of the land was distributed to rich people for most of the time. Well, ok, but those are some pretty big exceptions.
And third, my comments to you aren’t contentious, but baffled. Apparently, you’ve never seen me contentious.
dollared
@Bob Loblaw: I think you overstate the inevitability of globalization, and the inevitability of its consequences.
You should read Dean Baker at CEPR (use Bing or Google to find). He is really great at outlining just how globalization is the result of a series of conscious choices that always harm the value of labor and the environment, and increase the value of IP and capital.
Examples: what if there were a carbon tax, and it was assessed on teh basis of the energy content of goods built abroad? What if there were international labor standards – 40 hour weeks, paid vacations, healthcare, union association and negotiation rights – required of trading partners? None of these things would be any harder than all the effort put into stopping international counterfeiting or software piracy – but there are no efforts.
Globalization is not the market in action – it is a stacked game of regulatory arbitrage that hurts everyone involved.
joe from Lowell
@Phoebe:
I think you’re missing the central point of Ford’s theories. He didn’t just want his workers to be happy workers, but to be rich enough to buy his cars – and everyone else’s workers, too. He saw that he had a stake in them not just as his workers, but as his customers, and he perceived his interest as having as large a body of potential customers (meaning, middle-class people) as possible.
Brachiator
@dollared:
I understand what you are saying, but this is something different from the fact that Ronnie connected with a lot of working people. You can end up missing a lot of sources of voter discontent if you ignore some of the nuance.
General Stuck
It is more than just a class war, it is also regional and deeply philosophical pertaining to basic world views that has it’s roots in white supremacy. This is why the concepts of class struggles and fighting for financial class self interest is trumped by deeply formed and held beliefs of race entitlement and rejection of equal protection under the law, along a whole host of other problems the south and others hold for the basic tenets written into our founding document.
We fought a civil war over race and slavery, but the civil war goes on still in spirit with race, the place of religion in our governance, and a laundry list of other grievances held for generations. The high functioning class war doesn’t rate at the top of that pile of dubious intent currently, but as bank accounts dwindle and the shit sandwiches get bigger from the plutocrats to their nativistic foot soldiers, it will rise up toward the top of the white man’s to do list, and they will turn their rage back on the money grubbers. it is hard to hold onto notions of birthright, when the stomach is empty.
The ruling rich class has mostly kept their greed in check to not go past such a fail safe point with the middle class, at least since TGD, that is only a creation of numbers, and is by itself colorblind. It seems by the day, that whatever such inhibitions the plutocrats have had on the matter, are being discarded in favor of all out class warfare, that will show not much mercy to white conservatives, any more than anyone else.
PeakVT
Was there always a feeling that they didn’t need the American middle-class, that they could make their money elsewhere?
No, that’s clearly getting more pronounced. Containerization of the shipping industry, the end of Bretton Woods, the PC revolution, and the internet revolution have each enabled information, goods, and capital to move ever faster. Meanwhile, people mostly remain trapped by national borders.
Bob Loblaw
@dollared:
DougJ’s question wasn’t about why it was happening, just whether it was happening (a sea change in class and national identities, that is).
srv
@David in NY:
Well, I’d thrown in Network, and the Corporate Cosmology speech.
And, well, Being There.
artem1s
all of the above with a big dollop of religious fundamentalism on top to go please. The turn of the last century saw the rise of several ‘magical thinking’ cults within Christianity in the US. It took them 50 or so years to go mainstream with proselytizing via the airwaves but once they got their hands on radio and TV their numbers went exponential.
St. Ronnie gave them an inch in politics and then we were off to the races and the cult of greed got mixed in with deathbed conversion crazies who believed anything they did was justified as long as they were ‘saved’. Rapture frenzy reached its peak with the Y2K apocalypse and, just like the last century (and millennium) turning, will take some time to dissipate.
The country has been one giant Jonestown on steroids for the last 3 decades now. The wingnuts are lining up to drink the Koolaid every couple of years with a different hairdo at the altar egging them on. Everyone of them believe that if they pray just right and follow all the rules they will be rewarded with the same riches as the grifters who are stealing from the collection plate.
And first and foremost of the rules is that ‘the heathens’ and ‘sinners’ have to stand at the back of the line, if they get in at all. Several of these cults love to teach that the seating in heaven is limited to a first come, first served basis. Proving the existence of the Ark and Sodom is an obsession with them.
All of their mythology revolves around who gets a seat in the lifeboat and who is the target of righteous retribution. Is it any wonder our politics has become fixated on punishing the unworthy?
dollared
@Bob Loblaw: I’m just saying that this is inaccurate:
You are describing what is happening as if it *must*. It can be stopped at any time. We just need 60% voter turnout in the bottom two income quartiles. That’s all it would take.
transmaniacon
@Bob Loblaw:
I’m still curious to see if you can answer my question.
Take your time.
joe from Lowell
This isn’t even a distinction between ordinary people and elites, except for the railroads. Yes, ordinary people were allowed to stake out claims to be used for raising livestock, or for mining, or for lumber. Even the “speculators,” a term we usually associate with rich investors – we’re talking about free land. Yes, some people staked out claims in the hopes of selling their land, or otherwise making their livings in ways other than farming; this is yet another way that giving away free land was a strategy to foster a broad base of wealth.
Bob Loblaw
@transmaniacon:
This question?
The official recession ended almost two years ago. I don’t know what you mean by consensus. And I still don’t know what elections you’re referring to.
So yes, I will certainly take my time. All of it, actually.
joe from Lowell
There were gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia in November 2009, while the recession ended in July. Is that what transmaniacon is referring to?
What am I missing?
Bob Loblaw
@joe from Lowell:
Apparently we aren’t in on the code.
Phoebe
@joe from Lowell: Okay. It’s like he fed them decent food so he could get decent manure for his crops, and regardless of his motivation, decent food is decent food. I think Doug’s question was, did the powerful always not get that they need our manure to be decent for their crops? Or just now? So Ford would be an example of someone who saw his own interest as bound to his workers’, to some extent. Completely screwing them would shoot his own foot, so no completely screwing them. I agree with whoever up there said that when times look tough, the haves start to panic and think they need to screw over the have-nots, because there’s no investing in long-term stability and the music ran out and grab a chair, fast. I like metaphors, maybe too much.
transmaniacon
@Bob Loblaw:
I’m not the one who mentioned elections, that was you.
The rest of your theory seems interesting…did you come by it originally or did you pick that up on ATS?
dollared
@Bob Loblaw: Bullshit. S&P is doing Wall Street’s bidding here. The desperation, after Obama’s speech is palpable.
Look, the war is over the effective tax rates for the top 500,000 net worth and income individuals in the US. And in this war every tool and weapon will be used, and all innocent bystanders (the rest of the US’ residents) will be used as human shields. It’s the way the Republicans and Wall Street have been playing since 9/11 opened the door.
Bob Loblaw
@transmaniacon:
Nope, it was jeff, who you were agreeing with.
But thank you for clarifying that you are in fact speaking in code. ATS indeed.
@dollared:
Wall Street has broader concerns than US marginal tax rates. Shocking, I know. Political debt default isn’t even to be sniffed at.
transmaniacon
@Bob Loblaw:
What was the flashy PR “downgrade” specifically?
I must have missed that.
Bob Loblaw
@transmaniacon:
The S&P today. They didn’t actually downgrade anything (hence the quotation marks), they threatened that they were considering maybe downgrading US debt if the deficit situation isn’t “resolved” in adequate time and fashion.
A “negative outlook” is just a form of political and market manipulation that only rating agencies are allowed to do. It’s just a way of forcing the issue.
transmaniacon
@Bob Loblaw:
So Jeff was right.
Bob Loblaw
@transmaniacon:
No, because it wasn’t done for partisan sabotage. It’s a warning to both sides that they’re being watched very carefully.
Wolfdaughter
I’m a long view and big picture person.
Yes, the very rich are doing their best to crush the middle class and the poor. And for the short term (this can and probably will be a number of years) they can go global and exploit poorer countries with people who are very hungry.
But. BUT. India and China do have growing middle classes. People in some of the Islamic countries are revolting and taking over governments. These are both leading indicators.
Historical trends have been inexorably tending towards greater equality. No more legal slavery, for instance. People are people with similar needs, wants, and wishes. The Internet is relentlessly eqalitarian. It allows for a spread of information and ideas unprecedented in human history. Sure, a lot of shlock and bad ideas get spread very easily. But so do good ideas. I personally believe that what is holding back the disgustingly rich from totally taking over the USA is the Internet. If our only means of communication were the lamestream media, the ugly right wing would have much greater success than they have. They certainly have had a lot of success, but there is growing push back and the Internet enables us little people to communicate and to know we’re not alone.
Progress goes in a spiral. It’s not linear. Right now we’re at the bottom part of a spiral, but things will trend upward again. Peoples of the world are beginning to understand that they have been ruthlessly used and that there may be alternatives. I’m not a Marxist, but I can foresee that there could be an uprising of the proletariat worldwide. Of course, the way we keep plowing through resources may instead usher in a life that’s “nasty, brutish, and short”. But that doesn’t have to happen.
transmaniacon
@Bob Loblaw:
Sure it was. It favors reduction mostly on the terms of the current House.
My original point was that I find it strange that employment has been lagging substantial corporate growth.
As an apologist, you don’t seem to have an answer for that.
Elia Isquire
just catching this thread (and the one that inspired it) now, but i wrote about this column already this morning. in general, i think p m carpenter is right in saying that it’s more or less always been thus.
dollared
@Bob Loblaw: Bullshit. It is a transparent, low probability attempt to convince the Democrats that an “objective third party” believes that the Republicans will “shoot the ni%&^r” in the debt limit showdown, to give the Republicans more leverage. Read Krugman’s posts today (I’m sure you think he is a communist, but never mind). He tracks how the real bond traders laughed at this ruse and actually bid up US bonds today.
dollared
@Wolfdaughter: I am an optimist, too, but I try like hell to make sure not too many millions of people have miserable lives before your arc of history finally bends in the right direction. As Keynes said, “In the long run, we are all dead.”
Bob Loblaw
@dollared:
The rating agencies aren’t trying to speak for bond vigilantes, they’re speaking for the wealthy in general. Who do not have a handle on the politics of the moment, Democratic or Republican. And that’s a problem.
It was just a friendly political warning from our neighborhood plutocrats that Washington is being watched. Scaring the layman is just a bonus.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Dan:
Like our Comrade DougJ, I feel exactly the same way. And if someone like me, with the earning power* of a doctorate, feels this way, how do the members of my cohort with just general bachelors (and below) feel? Not to mention the laborers w/o the “earning ability” of a college education.
*primarily public sector employment here, since I always believed that doing the right thing was part of the bargain
transmaniacon
@Bob Loblaw:
So, what’s scaring companies from hiring?
Explain it to a layman.
dogwood
@dollared:
There you go. The structures that enabled the success of the Homestead Act, were enabled by 2 of the finest pieces of legislation in the country’s history: The Land Ordinance of 1785, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Both passed during the period of the Articles of Confederation. Both showing a sense of foresight that seems no longer possible in this nation.
dollared
@dogwood: Amen. But to be fair, there is generally (not always, remember my Brazil example) more foresight when there are more resources than people.
Our challenge in the US is that there is now the usual ratio of resources to people, and we’ve been so busy pissing away the surplus on imported oil, freedom bombs and tax cuts that we don’t know how to manage things rationally.
mclaren
Goddammit, DougJ, read your history!
The U.S. army shot down middle-class and working class rioters like dogs after Lincoln set up conscription during the Civil War — but let rich people get out of serving by paying $300.
Workers broke into rich people’s houses and shot ’em dead. Rioters burned the mayor’s residence.
There’s no excuse for a post this lazy. Dammit, you’re educated, look up a book on the New York draft riots in 1863 or the Molly Malones who blew up coal mines in the 1870s to protest the way they were robbed by the mine owners’ “company towns” (after a week of backbreaking work, a mine worker would be about 12 cents ahead due to the exorbitant rent and cost of food at the company housing and the company store). Read a book about the Haymarket Riots when Americas were shot down and clubbed to death for demanding an eight-hour working day. Read a book about the Pullman strikes of1894 when federal troops opened fire on women and children in support of the millionaires.
Haven’t you even heard of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire?
And you have the gall to even ask whether it’s ever been any different…?
Wolfdaughter
@dollared:
Absolutely try to make lives of the millions (actually billions) better, in any way that is feasible. Unfortunately we have little influence in other countries, but we can influence events here in the U.S. if we band together. We should be starting now to locate good progressive candidates and support them, be it financial, phone banks, going door-to-door, etc.
I have a small amount of inherited money, part of which I’m using to donate to organizations such as Physicians without Borders and Heifer.
I’m just saying that what the obscenely wealthy are trying to do now WILL backfire on them, but probably not immediately or in the near future.
Chris
I’m sure contempt for the rest has always been popular for the upper classes, but that contempt hasn’t always been allowed free reins. Political realities have imposed greater or lesser constraints on the elites, regardless of their personal feelings. The New Deal era and the liberal consensus for the next couple decades is one example.
But since the eighties, they’ve had a free rein, so they’ve been able to express their contempt (both in rhetoric and in practice) far more openly. And that’s largely because of the amount of middle-class people who either ignore or join in with them in heaping crap onto the working class. Class resentment flows downward now for a lot more people than in the Gilded Age. Hence, the elites are safe.
JR in WV
There used to be a factory in Charleston that made tools, like axes, pitchforks, tar, feathers…
Everything you need to fix class uppityness but a fence rail!
Dan
@Comrade DougJ: I know there are some (too many) that think the economics should be “Darwinian” or “law of the jungle”. But they don’t understand those things fundamentally. A lion doesn’t have anything to gain (and actually has a lot to lose) by killing all the zebras at once.
Our current crop of sociopaths want to kill all the zebras.
Mark @ Israel
The ruling class might feel that they do not need the middle class but they definitely need the middle class. Who would they rule if there is no middle class? How would they be the ruling class without a middle class or a lower class to rule? That would be absurd.