Class Warfare
Have you seen the little piggies
Crawling in the dirt
And for all those little piggies
Life is getting worse
Always having dirt to play around in.
Have you seen the bigger piggies
In their starched white shirts
You will find the bigger piggies
Stirring up the dirt
And they always have clean shirts to play around in.
And in their styes with all their backing
They don't care what goes on around
And in their eyes there's something lacking
What they needs a damm good whacking.
Yeah, everywhere there's lots of piggies
Playing piggy pranks
And you can see them on their trotters
Down at the piggy banks
Paying piggy thanks
To thee pig brother
Everywhere there's lots of piggies
Living piggy lives
You can see them out for dinner
With their piggy wives
Clutching forks and knives to eat their bacon.
-- George Harrison
My father's extended family included numerous activists in the railroad unions. His dad came to the US in 1879, when some absentee landlord from another land evicted the family from the land in Ireland where they had lived on since the beginning of time. Dad told me many of the stories he had heard as a child, about the often violent conflicts between the working class and the non-working wealthy.
My grandfather and his family came here during what Mark Twain called the Gilded Age. He told my father about two federal acts that had been started in the years before he immigrated: in 1862, the Homestead Act promised private citizens title to 160-acre lots out west, for a small registration fee; the second "act" was the government's giving a quarter-million square miles of land to the railroad robber barons. Between 1865 and 1900, this was a gift larger than the states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin combined.
It was, my father noted, the American way of institutionalizing class warfare in a legal way.
In the early 1900s, many in the working class again began to think in terms of class warfare. Some, he said, were the "liberals," who felt the political-economic system needed fine-tuning in order to be fair to everyone; others were "progressives," who believed in a more complete change, to what people called "democratic socialism" or "communism." Unions were viewed as the vehicle that would lead to social justice. During the Great Depression, many liberals and progressives began to identify FDR's New Deal coalition. They began to see government, even more so than unions, as being able to protect individual and families' rights.
Obviously, there were still large groups being mistreated as "less equal" than others. In the post-WW2 industrial boom, more and more people (especially white folks) became suburbanites: dad worked, mom cooked and cleaned, happy children went to school, and the whole family enjoyed the miracle of television, and a summer vacation. This was the liberal version of the American Dream.
The pesky progressives shrank in number and influence. Any alliance with liberals disappeared with the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which progressives called the "slave labor act." Congress overrode President Truman's veto to inact what Harry called "a dangerous intrusion on free speech." Seven years later, Senator Hubert Humphrey devised and sponsored the "Communist Control Act," which would have criminalized political thought.
Adlai Stevenson, liberal, was more popular -- thus influential -- than Henery Wallace, progressive. Thus, my father said, the liberals either bought into the system, or were bought by it. People who were living in comfortable houses were unlikely to protest too much, especially if they were making mortgage payments. Only two US Presidents would really work to institute significant changes in "the system" after Ike eight years: JFK would run as a semi-liberal cold warrior, then attempt to make progressive change; and LBJ would try to update the New Deal with his Great Society programs, but folded under the pressure from the war machine in Vietnam.
I think that many of these same dynamics are in play today. Even on this forum, for example, we see liberals who are pro-President Obama, often without any question (bomb Syria? Sure!), and progressives, who want more significant change than this President would ever consider. Some of us were comfortable when the "Occupy" movement brought the idea of class warfare to the public's consciousness; others were uncomfortable. I thought it was a good attempt to bring about an updated version of the "Poor Peoples' Campaign" that Martin Luther King was planning, at the time of his death.
= new reply since forum marked as read
and remain vigilant. We became apathetic, most of us. And while we were sleeping they were very busy.
Predatory Capitalism needs to be relegated to the dustbin of history like all the other 'isms' before it. Enough harm has been done.
Thanks for you comment, socialist! 
& R
Well written,
and thought provoking.
I disagree with only one statement:
"LBJ would try to update the New Deal with his Great Society programs, but folded under the pressure from the war machine in Vietnam."
LBJ didn't "fold".
Despite the VietNam War, he was still able to get a National, Single Payer, Publicly Owned, Government Administered Health Care Program (Medicare) enacted, and most of the Great Society & War on Poverty Programs enacted too.
Some Great Society proposals were stalled initiatives from John F. Kennedy's New Frontier. Johnson's success depended on his skills of persuasion, coupled with the Democratic landslide in the 1964 election that brought in many new liberals to Congress, making the House of Representatives in 1965 the most liberal House since 1938.
Anti-war Democrats complained that spending on the Vietnam War choked off the Great Society. While some of the programs have been eliminated or had their funding reduced, many of them, including Medicare, Medicaid, the Older Americans Act and federal education funding, continue to the present. The Great Society's programs expanded under the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society
It is sad to realize that that crusty old WarMonger was the most Liberal President of the last 1/2 Century.
"The Johnson Treatment".
http://thejohnsonpost.blogspot.com/2009/08/johnson-treatment.html
Bookmarked 
