By Gene Ogorodov
In the past few years the United States has been playing a dangerous game. Drunk with optimism and hubris Washington has convinced itself that everything is fine. Analysts predict the continuation of the American Century well into the 22nd Century and reinvigorated prosperity at home. They imagine that the current era is just a blip on an otherwise perfect screen. But far from being fine Washington is playing a game of Russian Roulette with the sentiments and feelings of the American people.
Since the founding of the Republic the political life of the nation has remained firmly tied to the interests of the middle classes. Although 19th Century America proved to be fertile ground for the accumulation of enormous fortunes, the politicians felt themselves obliged to pander to the interests and concerns of the smaller manufactures and merchants and the professional classes.
But in the 1980s the world changed. Regan and the Neo-Conservatives ushered in a new era that united the sentiments of lower white-collar workers with the optimism of upwardly mobile blue-collar workers to support the cupidity of the plutocratic class. The great lie was born—selfishness is the only thing that can have altruistic consequences, or, in the words of Wall Street, “Greed is good.”
Billions of dollars was pumped into propagating this message. Education and information became perverted while right-wing elements brain-washed formerly conservative elements of America. Spin doctors appealed to lust and avarice covered in the sheep's clothing of Market-Efficiency, and the American People bought it.
A side effect of the successes of Regan-ism was that American Politicians began to stop seeing the average white-collar worker as his or her political master capable of deciding when his or her career ends. Washington started to see white-collar workers as a class that can be duped and bullied into supporting policies that are against their interests. Like the blue-collar workers the white-collar workers became a class without a political voice.
At the same time business found itself capable of attacking wages and cutting benefits. The 1980s and 1990s saw for the first time in American history wage stagnation. There were jobs but the jobs gradually began to get worse. Unionized manufacturing jobs began to evaporate as globalization carried factories overseas. Engineers and salaried workers found increased competition as rates of college education grew faster than jobs that required one.
The tax burden was shifted off of the backs of corporations onto private citizens. The wealthy found tax-havens and loopholes to avoid contributing to society and, during the George W. Bush administration, were given a lower tax-rate altogether.
Who was left holding the tax burden? The professional classes and the smaller capitalists. Doctors, Lawyers, Engineers, smaller merchants and manufacturers, and highly trained specialized labor saw their incomes decrease and the weight of paying the bills of the United States Government.
Thus the people who, since the beginnings of the United States, had found this country most welcoming now discovered themselves dispossessed and disenfranchised. The people who should be doing the best found themselves hemmed in on all sides.
To justify the political disenfranchisement of the middle class Washington propagandists created a myth of White American perfidy. White Americans and White American culture was responsible for all the vices that United States had in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Americanism, so these spin doctors said, was an idea, an ideology yet to be actualized, suggesting that it is White Anglo-American culture that has prevented the fulfillment of our national ideal. Predominately White and male white-collar Americans could thus rationalize their personal struggle as the just leveling of the racial and gender playing field.1
All labor oppressed and depressed, but in the 1990s individuals could convince themselves that the poverty they experienced was their's alone in isolation amidst an ocean of prosperity. Furthermore unprecedented levels of debt help disguise the destitution of one's neighbors. Isolated, each and every American trusted in the Efficiency of the Market and the ultimate reward that it would bring to their hard work. Cast the dice infinite number of times and it will inevitably land on seven at some point. Who cares how many times you lose if in the end you always be a winner!
However, everyone was not a winner. The vast majority of people kept loosing and loosing and squandered the little that they had because the system created perverse incentives to encourage people to give their money back to the large Capitalists. Credit and Retailers working hand-in-hand encouraged a culture of overconsumption, bleeding salaried and wage labor dry without visibly hurting the standard of living.
This was fine as long as there was infinite credit, but the nature of credit assumes that there is not infinite. Rather than creating universal freedom through easy debt, financial capitalists created ubiquitous debt slavery, which remained unseen until the Financial Collapse of 2008-2009.
The scales fell from the eyes of the American people. As bank after bank went into foreclosure, it became painfully obvious that investment was not a win-win situation. There are winners and there are losers. In a nation that has collected the largest fortunes in human history no one needed to ask who were the winners, and gradually workers white-collar and blue-collar recognized that they were the losers.
Now we move to today. Privatization and the disciplining of labor through the creation of a precariat have turned the all working classes against the status quo. Anger boils underneath the surface in every corner of the United States. Americans have had enough. Lies and fairy tales have kept them at bay for too long, now they grow restless and want their fair share.
Demagogues on both the right and the left fan the flames of American anger with vitriolic rhetoric demonizing this group or that. Most, nevertheless, remain in the creatures of the ruling class reciting the same old acceptable rhetoric rather than conducting any serious critique of the predatory capitalist system extent in the United States. It goes without saying, one should be weary of taking the artificially seditious rhetoric of the likes of the Tea Party or the NRA too seriously, but the violence they, and movements like them, give voice to has clearly grown out of the very real sense of exasperation.
However, the real concern is that this burning anger is not just the possession of a small dejected minority. It is a ubiquitous. From the overworked brokers on Wall Street devoid of leisure to the itinerant farm worker down on his or her luck openly express a distaste for the status quo. Even in the ranks of the American Military NCOs and Officers open talk favorably of revolution and fantasize becoming partisans. (Right wing fanaticism or not that crosses a dangerous line that should not be ignored. Qui custodiet ipsos custodes.)
Furthermore, the unprecedented concentration of wealth and power in the hands of an increasingly smaller number of people has left the professional classes dejected and oppressed. At one time a professional job in America ensured a secure and a high standard of living, free from the fears of deprivation and redundancy, but no longer.
A PhD can lose his or her job as easily as a janitor even though on average it takes a decade to earn. Tenured positions are few and far between. Some settle for being Lecturers; many take their degree and hunt for an underpaid job in business. It is not uncommon for surgeons to conduct surgery after surgery for eighteen hours a day is not unknown. Law is a toss-up. A few do quite well, representing wealthy clients; most struggle to earn enough to stay in practice going from one divorce to the next or prostitute their work to major corporations that buy a couple star lawyers and fill the legal department with an underpaid overworked second string. Engineers and programmers are numerous as the sands of the sea and as thankless.
The plutocratic class has remained so unchallenged that even the professionals are now literally wage slaves. This is perverse and desperate, yet ironic. The professional classes can do everything the ruling plutocratic class does—only more efficiently and more cheaply. Built into the marginalization of the professional classes is the redundancy of the plutocrats. No amount of experience in business administration is worth 300 times the average engineer's salary.
The arithmetic is obvious. In erasing the differences between the white-collar and blue-collar workers, the plutocrats have, to borrow Marxist vocabulary, created a vanguard of the proletariat out of the professional classes. The petite bourgeoisie are beginning to see themselves as cut from a different cloth than the grand bourgeoisie. The 99% against the 1% of Occupy becomes more obviously true every day. The lot of the professional class has been cast with the rest of labor. The drain on society is not the broad base of the working people, but the leaches that consume exorbitant salaries for doing nothing.
The United States needs to curb the abuses of the current system and return to the humanity of an earlier era and be the nation of ALL the people. The government needs to end its affair with greed and private interests and put social responsibility above cronyism before it is too late. Worse than perpetuating a system that has made the overwhelming majority of its people miserable it has perpetuated an inefficient system. Washington needs sweeping reforms, and if current trends continue one would not be faulted for believing they could happen irrespective of what our political masters want.
Now I am not suggesting that a revolution would be a good idea. It may be, but Blogspot is certain not good place to make such suggestions. (I am absolutely positive that the NSA spies know more about Gene Ogorodov than I do myself and much better financed; so starting a revolution here wouldn't have a soggy ice-cream cone's chance hell of surviving.) Furthermore, I personally believe that the current system is capable of instituting the reforms and initiatives necessary to avert disaster. FDR did.
No sane person wants revolution and the unspeakable horrors and suffering it would bring, nor is revolution unavoidably imminent. But we need reforms now so that it never becomes a viable option. The last decade has seen the world change for the worse very quickly and very dramatically everywhere. To pretend that catastrophes cannot happen in the United States because we do not want them to is idiotic. We need to buttress ourselves against the worst possibilities so that we never taste a bitter gall that the country cannot endure.
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1 That is not to say that the United States doesn't have a problem with racism and gender equality, but to be frank what former European colony doesn't? To describe the savage incessant violence of the wars between Anglo-Americans and Native Americans that lasted 300 years as systematic one sided genocide of a peace loving people is willful ignorance. One, there is not one indigenous people; two, unspeakable atrocities were committed by both sides; three, the most high-handed abuses were done in the noble name of profit.
As far as slavery and race relations between White and Black Americans is concerned one should take into consideration that more Black men are in prison today in the United States than were ever enslaved at any time before the 13th Amendment. In slavery the United States inherited a perverse system which some Americans addressed in a laudable manner and others less so, but the lack of self-reflection in contemporary America has created a judicial system that is both indisputably illegal and immoral which stinks far worse than 19th Century slavery with all its abuses and rationalized dehumanization.
To judge any 19th Century culture because it didn't promote the ostensible gender equality of Women's Liberation can only be described as silly. Furthermore, Women's Lib is hardly the pinnacle of gender equality, cf. Kollontai.)
