The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class

[Makalakumu]

This video is very good. Lots of well reasoned and well cited arguments presented. Lots of statistics. Check it out...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7657610222796819392&hl=en

First of all, what do you think? Secondly, which candidate has the best plan to fix the numerous problems raised by this video?

 

[Josh]

This video is very good. Lots of well reasoned and well cited arguments presented. Lots of statistics. Check it out...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7657610222796819392&hl=en

First of all, what do you think? Secondly, which candidate has the best plan to fix the numerous problems raised by this video?

It may be my browser, but it wouldn't let me view the video.

About the collapse of the middle class I have to say that I feel it's a combination of reasons responsible. It feels like the definition of middle class has changed in the past few decades (not that I can PERSONALLY remember)
It feels like blue collar jobs just don't pull in enough money anymore.
Not to mention that it's as if you just about need a BA to run a cash register these days.

Also, I feel that with the shipping of Labor/Factory jobs (Especially the steel industry) out of the country....So goes the middle class.
IMHO, Working-Class blue collar folks are the backbone of the United States. When their jobs are de-valued and shipped out of country the middle class has a choice...Get a desk job (which requires more education most times) or slip into poverty.
Either way and no matter what your opinions on how or why we should all be worried about the decline of the middle class.

 

[terryl965]

Long video and alot of what was said is so true.

 

[tellner]

An excellent and scary point. You might also like Paul Krugman's The Great Unravelling and The Return to Depression Economics.

The real problem is that things aren't as tightly knit as the plutocrats would like to believe. The foundation of social stability and economic growth in this country has been the middle class. The hope for better is what makes people buy into the collective fantasy we call a country and follow the rules. Take away the hope - as is being done right now - and you sow the seeds for revolution. Eric Hoffer described it very nicely in The True Believer decades ago.

When people remember having something and see that it is lost and that they will never have it again they get angry. When that's combined with increasingly visible inequity, and especially when food and shelter reach some magic proportion of their income they are easily led to bloody, merciless violence.

The rich don't want to rock the boat unless it's to get a firmer grip on the tiller, the lifeboats and the cold beer. They also don't have to follow the rules and generally don't give two ***** about them except as they apply to the little people.

The dirt poor dont' rise up unless they're starving or others have already laid the groundwork. They know that rules are for fools and work around them in the quest to find the next dollar or save some of the crops from the tax collector.

It's the ones in the middle - the ones who have something to gain and something to lose - who do what they're supposed to. When they follow along and work hard it all works. When they decide that it's not getting them anywhere it all goes to hell in a remarkably short time.

You've probably seen the old 1920s/30s advertisement for Scott paper towels "Is your washroom breeding bolsheviks"

Yeah, its' funny now. But it wasn't so droll back in the day. People forget just how much hatred people had for The Boss. It was a time when there was great inequity, little social or economic mobility, pretty severe political repression, serious corruption on Wall Street and in government, and shrinking opportunities. That was the era of bomb-throwing Anarchists and Bonus Marchers. We came very close to a literal fascist coup in the US and had a potential army of the discontented - displaced veterans, hoboes and others who remembered a system they had had a stake in.

Now we are in an era where the rich are getting fewer but wealthier, family wage jobs are almost a thing of the past, and a shrinking middle class is supporting the very rich and the poor. We don't have the resources or resilience that we did in the New Deal era. We don't have leaders of the caliber of FDR or the money to fund the programs even if someone had the balls to put them forward. We've spent it all on a useless war and Teapot Dome cronyism.

In short, unless something really unexpected happens the lines are quickly running together on that particular graph. Little people like you and I, upnorthkyosa and Josh, are due to be squashed at the intersection.
​

 

[Josh]

Once the people understand what's happening to them.. I wouldn't be shocked to see some sort of revolt/revolution.
Too bad it will be awhile, we're consumed with our Ipods and SUVs.

 

[Makalakumu]

I think we need to keep in mind that the social managers at the turn of last century were far more candid then they are now. I'm not sure why, I think it was fear of immigrants and the degeneration racial hygiene that made it acceptable to tell everyone that they were creating a planned economy along with a social class system that resembled Anglican England.

People had to be kept in their place.

With that being said, I can see where the thought that at the turn of last century, things were far more oppressive, that their was MORE stratification among the classes. This just isn't the case. People had far more social mobility then they do now for the simple fact that their dollars were worth more and they were able to do more things without the modern serfdom society places on families.

Furthermore, our "wonderful" leaders like FDR, JFK and LBJ weren't as wonderful as they would seem on the surface. For example, people credit FDR with ending the depression, when in fact, the depression ended with the Federal Reserve increased the money supply with "debt money" in order to fund WWII. Under the auspices of the depression, however, FDR had the federal government seize all of the gold that American's owned, forcing them into the fiat system of currency...which was controlled by the private corporation that is known as the Federal Reserve.

All of this goes on and on and on and its very Machiavellian. The bottom line is that both sides of modern political spectrum are being played like puppets. We see one thing and the press shouts "rah rah rah!" meanwhile a completely different thing is really happening.

So, why don't Americans know more about this? For one thing, I think it should be noted that the major textbook publishers, like Houghton Mifflin, are being funded by foundations controlled by people like the Carnagies, Rockefellars, Morgans, Astors, etc. This was especially clear at the turn of the century when these foundations were spending more money on education then the government. Now, it is far more diffuse. Yet the material is the same. Even to the point where it has gotten so bold as to suggest to the government that we have high stakes History...oh wait, that term was changed at the turn of the century to "social studies"...Test.

What do most people call government approved history?

Propaganda.

Anyway, I agree with the gist of what Tellner is saying, but I think that its stilted toward the left/right hegelian rhetoric that people need to start seeing through. Our entire country, since the "civil war" has been manipulated by a leviathen of financial interests that have no regard for anyone but people like themselves. The founding fathers fought this battle and were somewhat successful in holding them off. They established a central bank in the US and Andrew Jackson killed it. Not before they tried to kill him...twice. Then came Lincoln, who issued the Greenbacks, he nearly took back the ultimate power of producing currency until he was killed. From that point on, the state grew larger and more prominent, even to the point where they could order a family to deliver its children into its grasp. (BTW - JFK suggested that secret societies should not be tolerated in a democracy that government should print the money...look it up.)

Jeckel's Island, Federal Reserve, Income Tax, voila...a nation of paupers. A nation consumed by debt on purpose. A nation undermined by Usury, a sin decried by the Bible, which is claimed by some to be the founding document that this country rests upon.

That is the very essence of Orwellian doublethink.

 

[tellner]

They weren't perfect, but they were generally on the right track.

FDR prevented complete social collapse and set America on a course for social, industrial, economic and political progress that lasted seventy years. He avoided mass uprisings by farmers, displaced workers and the new poor and got people working when it was psychologically vital that they have real work. He finessed the fascist coup on the part of Prescott Bush and the rest of that evil old plutocratic crew, although I think he should have hanged them all for sedition and decorated every lamppost on Pennsylvania Avenue with their corpses.

His main failure was in thinking he could handle everything through personal connections. He refused to admit to his own ill-health and left a politically unprepared Harry Truman to be pushed around by the Pentagon, GM and the other big players through his first term.

Lyin' Be Johnson screwed us over with his needless war in Vietnam. It was based on lies, sham and his psychotic Texas pride. We've had two Texans in the Oval Office. They've both been unremitting foreign policy **** ups. Elect one Texan to the Presidency, shame on him. Elect two of them, shame on us.

But his domestic work was much better. He forced the South to finally admit that *shudder* Negroes were human beings. At gunpoint when necessary. For all that it makes Lard Boy, Mike Weiner and Gordon "Inspector Clouseau" Liddy hysterical his Great Society worked and was the high watermark for the Middle Class.

 

[Makalakumu]

The entire Bush family funds political campaigns, at least partly, on profits from Auschwitzs. The records that showed the connection between the Bushes, the Union Banking Corporation and I.G. Farben and Fritz Thyssen were destroyed in a fire during Bush the Elder's presidency.

I won't claim that these guys were on the right track any more then others. There is another agenda that subsumes all of this.