Classicide - Gassing the American Middle Class [View All]

[arendt]

Five and a half years ago, I essayed that our middle class was being decimated:

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 two years already. 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Some middle class folks (mostly libertarians who don't understand that their status as 'useful idiots' has been revoked) think they can help the aristos to rationalize the economy.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 unrequested 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."

Clearcutting the Middle Class (posted January 8, 2003)
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/arendt/54

Gee, not to toot my own horn or anything, but how did that "rigged, phony presidential election" of 2004 work out for you all? And, are you looking forward to the rigged, phony presidential election of 2008, complete with well-timed assault on Iran? Maybe, just maybe, you might want be interested in this update on the prognosis for the American middle class.

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After seven years of Bush rule, it is more clear than ever that the super-rich 0.1% in America loathe the middle class that FDR created as much as pre-WW2 European anti-Semites loathed nouveau riche, assimilated Jews. It did not matter that those Jews were competent and loyal to the existing order. It only mattered that they were too "other", too intelligent, and too successful. Likewise, it does not matter to the American elites that the middle class made America rich and successful, that they want to join country clubs, buy yachts, and generally ape the rich.

To the super-rich, the middle class are not humans. In their scheme, there is only the master class and its slaves. The middle class, with its demands for regulation of unscrupulous business practices and for progressive taxation, is a threatening, unwashed "other", which momentarily reduced their share of the national income from 40% to 20%. But, no worries. Not only is the parasitical super-rich's share back to 40% under Bush, but the middle class is on its way to the showers - not in the baseball sense of the term, but in the Auschwitz sense.

In the American economy, petroleum is like oxygen. Lack of petroleum will kill this society faster than lack of water or lack of food. Like oxygen, petroleum is what runs our auto-dependent suburbs, our manufactured fertilizer agriculture, our imported from China economy. Taking petroleum away from America is like taking oxygen away from mammals. By raising its price to levels unaffordable by the middle class, via market manipulation (in the absence of any real shortage), the super-rich are deliberately killing the middle class - gassing them to death.

I have read that, when they opened the gas chambers after a mass murder, the capos (prisoners who did the dirty work in exchange for continuing to live) found the victims formed into a grisly pyramid underneath the hole for the exhaust fan, with the youngest and strongest victims on the top of the pyramid. This happened because, when faced with death, they all tried to live. They fought and crawled over each other for the last breath of un-poisoned air. The strongest did indeed make it to the top; but they still died.

I find it ironic that libertarians, and other "useful idiot" sympathizers of the right, who constantly fell for the Social Darwinistic worldview pushed by the GOP, are finally waking up to the fact that they have been had. But, only because they too are fighting for oxygen/petroleum with all the other victims of the gangster elite.

Nevertheless, worshippers of economic fundamentalism have a better chance of survival than people with humanistic principles. Libertarians have the self-centered mindset most likely to join the capos, to make their living by prying the gold teeth out of the dead victims' mouths. And, make no mistake about it, only capos (and other collaborators and sellouts, like the Pelosi/ Hoyer /Reid leadership of the Democratic Party) will survive the "classicide" now underway in America without becoming slaves.

In case you hadn't noticed, the only industries booming in America today are industries that prey on the economic and social misery of the ex-middle class: foreclosure experts, payday loan shops, outsourcers, temporary agencies, pawnshops, managers of cold-call boiler-rooms, HMO middlemen, military and private prison contractors, university presidents, and all the other sickening scavengers picking over the murdered corpse of FDR's America. And, while most super-rich are squemish about the actual murder, I have yet to see any of them intervene to stop it. After all, its not "their kind" that are suffering. Its only those "unwise, uppity" people who got in over their heads who are getting a lesson in economics - a lesson that will last for generations, if not forever.

The middle class in general is far from blameless in this classicide. As I said five years ago (was it really that long?) they remind me of those obedient, trusting Jews who packed the alloted one suitcase for their railroad trip to the camps. In America today, the middle class ran out to buy a worthless McHouse with a subprime mortgage, and they are now on a one-way trip to the poorhouse.

Just as the Nazis threw those suitcases in a heap, to later be picked over for jewelry or other valuables, the American elites long since made their money closing the deal on those subprime mortgages. As far as the elites are concerned, those houses are just so many cardboard suitcases - rubbish to be picked over for some pocket change.

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In closing, if you still have a middle class job in America (hey, even if you only haven't yet been packed off to our world's largest prison system for some trivial offense), you should be thinking about an interesting statistic. The survival rate in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1944 was higher than the survival rate in the concentration camps. Yes, the middle class's situation is hopeless at this point; but we can go out fighting instead of rolling over for the likes of Pelosi, Reid, Hoyer, and Rahm Emmanuel's DSCC.(footnote)

America is not the world. Long after the demise of middle class America, historians in parts of the world that remained civilized will ask how we could have been so docile, so stupid. The answers will include television, suburbia, and corn syrup. Those historians will praise people who futilely, but bravely, resisted, like the Warsaw fighters and the July bomb plotters. They will honor people who did human things in the midst of barbarism, like Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg. They will have nothing but contempt for "good fundamentalist Christian Americans".

People always have a choice. You still have the power to determine how you will be remembered. Use that power wisely.

arendt

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Footnote: The DLC/DSCC crowd reminds me of the Russian Army, which encouraged the Ghetto uprising to weaken the Germans, and then sat outside the city while the partisans were hunted down like rats. When the war was over, the people of Warsaw were no better off under the Soviets than under the Nazis. However, the ultra-nationalist Polish rightwing did appreciate the "cleansing" done for them. Contemplate that before you donate to the rich, pro-war candidates that the DSCC/DCCC has favored over genuine Iraq War veterans (like that clown in Florida who says he owes the Democratic Party nothing).