-Caveat Lector- Clear-cutting the middle class
By H.N. Arendt Online Journal Contributing Writer "Today is history. For six centuries there has been a Jewish Kraków. By this evening, those six centuries will be a rumor. They never happened. Today is history."—S.S. Commandant Goeth (Schindler's List) January 23, 2003—If you are a still a member of the rapidly shrinking American middle class, especially if you are a credentialed professional (doctor, scientist, teacher, etc.), you should have no doubt that you have been targeted for economic and political destruction by a Southern Republican Aristocracy and its fundamentalist foot soldiers, as surely as the Jews were targeted by the Nazis. (Being truly middle class means that you have a college or post-graduate education, a secure career instead of an insecure job, a pleasant, crime-free place to live, decent health care, and retirement security; and that you can afford to prepare your children to obtain the same things. Given the ever-rising cost of college education and the replacement of fixed-payout pensions by fixed-contribution 401ks, you need to have a damn good job to consider yourself truly middle class, as opposed to merely being near a steadily decreasing median income level.) If you are unaware of being under attack, consider the implications of a few widely known facts about Fundamentalism. First, it is rabidly anti-intellectual. Fundies actually believe that thinking too much is one of Satan's snares, that belief is more important than understanding. Their fanatical denial of modern biology is long-standing (coinciding with the founding of modern fundamentalism); and it goes hand-in-hand with their congenital distrust of higher educational institutions and their "moral relativism". Second, their discounting of the body and of worldly pleasures, to the point of facilitating a war in the Middle East to bring on Armageddon today, demonstrates their disregard for sensible planning regarding life's well-known vicissitudes, such as ill-health and old-age. Third, consider their Calvinistic attitude that wealth indicates God's favor. This sets up fundies to give a free pass to the corrupt Republican plutocracy, who are seen as God's chosen elect instead of a swarm of locusts. Finally, consider the strongly regional nature of fundamentalism, and its long-standing ties with neo-Confederate, States-Rights sympathizers. The overlap between fundamentalism, militarism, mysogyny, homophobia, and racism is large; and for Manicheans like them, those who are not with them are against them. Not only are these facts widely known, they are being stressed most strongly by some prominent people who used to be Republicans. Kevin Phillips, the actual author of Nixon's "Southern Strategy," has repeatedly inveighed against the hijacking of the Republican Party. Michael Lind, the former conservative ideologue who exposed Pat Robertson's anti-Semitism and was blackballed for doing so, has just written a book about the "Southern takeover". So, if you are a professional in denial about being targeted, you have no one to blame but yourself. You are smart enough to realize the media have been hijacked. The history and the theory is out there, and here are some unpleasant current events to go with that theory: The Bush administration is gleefully supporting more HMO depredations of doctors' rights and earning power, installing corporate shills and fundamentalist ideologues to previously objective scientific advisory panels, plotting to loot (i.e., privatize) Social Security, giving the green light to "redefining" (i.e., gutting) pre-existing pension plans, denying emergency room treatment to Medicaid patients, hypocritically trying to strike race from a diversity policy at the University of Michigan that includes alumni preference, engaging in McCarthyite loyalty oath campaigns on campus, wrecking the budget with giveaways to the rich, fiddling while the economy burns, polluting and drilling when and where they please, and warmongering like they want no tomorrow. This surreal domination of our national government by a fringe of unrepentant Confederate warmongers, racists, and Bible-belters is ideally positioned to take advantage of 20 years of runaway corporations sending our manufacturing capacity overseas. The corrupt Southern oil aristocracy that has hijacked our democracy is pulling out all the stops to destroy what little is left of the American economy. George Bush is the perfect cat's paw for this long-planned train wreck. He gives the brains behind the aristocracy "deniability." They can hide their economic coup behind his so-called religious principles; and if things go wrong, even he is expendable. That is not to say they aren't backing him to the hilt. His fundamentalism and anti-intellectualism are down played by the corporate media, which laughably present this Yalie scion of a blueblood family as "just plain folks." The media have declared him untouchable as a "wartime leader" and his deliberate mishandling of the economy on behalf of the aristocracy is also given kid-gloves treatment. Like Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo, what the aristocracy wants is "more." The aristocracy wants to return the uppity middle class to the subservient status it held in Europe before the French Revolution. The aristocracy thinks it can run a 21st century economy on the backs of Asian sweatshop labor and cheap Chinese and Indian professionals. So, it has detonated the demolition charges under the American economy. It has deliberately unbalanced the budget with massive giveaways to the rich. Then it increased military spending (on useless boondoggles like Son of Star Wars) when we already are spending more than our 10 nearest competitors combined. Finally, it has done nothing to help an economy reeling from a stock market bubble, massive corporate fraud, and massive government disruption of normal business practices in the name of fighting terrorism. The aristocracy has used the rest of America as a booster rocket to put themselves into permanent economic orbit, where they will collect their rents, royalties, and dividends and enforce their so-called intellectual property rights in perpetuity. The first stage of this financial rocket, the lower class, was burned out and jettisoned under Reagan in the early 80s recession and the first wave of overseas job flight. The second stage of the rocket, the non-professional middle-class, was thrown overboard in the early 90s, when the defense industries contracted after the end of communism. At that time large chunks of the middle class wound up working at fast food joints, losing medical insurance, and being priced out of the housing market and college tuition. We are now witnessing third stage separation, where the innovative economy run by the highly educated class is no longer needed. That educated professional class has massive savings, which have already been massively looted by the low-tech, highly-Republican-connected thugs and crooks whose fraud has ruined the stock market. The failure of the stock market has shut off the flow of investment capital to innovative companies and resulted in unprecedented professional unemployment. So, another big chunk of professional savings is being consumed to pay bills, while unemployment insurance is deliberately limited in the moment when it is most obviously needed. The rest of the middle class's treasure will be clear-cut by one means or another: runaway inflation or deflation, massive taxes to fund the war/security machine, confiscation for "supporting terrorists," whatever. When you have absolute power, you don't need a good reason; you just need a gun. The aristocracy believes that it no longer needs the innovative economy. It believes that the existing innovations are more than enough for a Praetorian Guard/Gestapo to control the rest of humanity. Thank you suckers; now bend over. The aristocracy believes it no longer needs a middle class because it can use its newly deregulated monopoly power to extort sufficient profits for themselves from choiceless consumers, no matter how poor they are. (Does the song "Sixteen Tons" ring any bells?) This has already worked for Enron, which extorted tens of billions of dollars from California and has yet to be brought to any kind of justice. The aristocracy believes it can use The Corporate State of America's monopoly on military power to grab any natural resource on earth, mostly oil, but soon water and food. The Southern aristos hypocritically made sure that government military pork and bases flowed disproportionately to their region, in spite of their hatred of big government handouts. Those bases and the solidly Southern Republican domination of the congressional military subcommittes gives the aristos a power base that should worry the rest of America. That power is behind the increasingly naked and unprincipled belligerence of the Southern Republican Aristocrats, both abroad and at home. The militaristic South and West, which they dominate, threatens to play the role of a rural Prussia towards an urban, commercial, but disorganized Northeast, Midwest and Pacific Coast In short, the aristocracy has reached a level of military and economic power that allows it to re-impose serfdom on the middle class. And they intend to begin with the American middle class—the biggest, richest, dumbest middle class on the planet; a thoroughly de-politicized middle class that has failed to defend the democratic machinery that allowed it (under progressive presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson) to roll back the power of the robber barons and create an unprecedented prosperity for the majority of citizens. The aristos daily go about sending troops around the world, trashing the U.S. Constitution with Federalist Society judicial stooges and the fanatical fundamentalist Ashcroft, issuing ludicrous, non-credible, but intimidating terrorism alerts whenever there is a pause in the war drumbeat, and stirring up new religious and racial animosity against a major monotheistic religion and a major ethnic group, while simultaneously restarting discrimination against black Americans. I don't know how much more I can do to spell it out. We are at war all right. It is war on the American Middle Class and the American Constitution; and it has been going on for years. If you haven't noticed, the middle class is losing without putting up a fight. In fact, it is voting for the people who are shooting at them. That makes it about as clueless as the Polish Jews who allowed themselves to be stuffed into cattle cars, hoping for the best. Some middle class folks (mostly libertarians who don't understand that their status as 'useful idiots' has been revoked) think they can help the aristos to rationalize the economy. Like the helpful Jewish engineer in Schindler's List, they will discover that giving unsolicited advice to the masters, even when trying to help , will be rewarded with a bullet to the head. To paraphrase Commandant Goeth, the Southern Republican Fundamentalist Party is saying: "For two centuries there has been a middle class democratic America. By the time of the next rigged, phony presidential election, those two centuries will be a rumor. They never happened." http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/Arendt012303/arendt012303.html printable version: http://www.onlinejournal.com/01-23-03_Arendt.pdf <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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