Jim Hightower: If You Don't Fight for the Middle Class, Kiss It Good-Bye

[marmar]

September 4, 2010 |



AlterNet / By Jim Hightower

Hightower: If You Don't Fight for the Middle Class, Kiss It Good-Bye
America's corporate chieftains must love poor people, for they're doing all they can to create millions more of them. Let's put a stop to this.


America's corporate chieftains must love poor people, for they're doing all they can to create millions more of them.

They're knocking down wages, offshoring everything from manufacturing jobs to high tech, reducing full-time work to part-time, downsizing our workplaces, busting unions, cutting health care coverage and canceling pensions -- while also lobbying in Washington to privatize Social Security, eliminate job safety protections, restrict unemployment benefits, kill job-creating programs and increase corporate control of our elections.

It's said that the poor and the rich will always be among us. But nowhere is it written that the middle-class will always be there. In fact, it is a very recent creation in our society (and an unavailable dream for most people in the world). America's great middle class literally arose with the rise of labor unions and populist political movements in the 1800s, finally culminating in democratic economic reforms implemented from the 1930s into the 1960s.

Social Security, wage AND hour laws, collective bargaining rights, unemployment compensation, the GI Bill, the interstate highway program, civil rights laws, Medicare, Head Start -- and more -- provided the national framework necessary to sustain a middle class for the American Majority.

This essential framework was not "given" to us by corporate executives and politicians -- indeed, they sputtered, spewed and fought every piece of it tooth and nail. Rather, it came from union-led grassroots movements, organizing for structural change. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/economy/148047/hightower%3A_if_you_don%27t_fight_for_the_middle_class%2C_kiss_it_good-bye/

[xchrom]

1. recommend - i think they're in the process of making out with us.

i guess some one will turn the lights on when it's over.

[Demeter]

2. The Middle Class IS America

and when it disappears, so does the Noble Experiment.

[ooglymoogly]

3. Hear, hear, When will people start

marching in the streets with torches and pitchforks.

[Uncle Joe]

4. I believe it was Benjamin Franklin that said

"We must all hang together or we surely hang seperately" and that's why they've attacked the middle class, piece by piece.

Like the old joke goes

Q; How do you eat an elephant?

A; One bite at a time.

This Labor Day, we see corporate executives and their politicians relentlessly dismantling that framework, piece by piece -- and we see the middle class disappearing and poverty rising with each dismantled piece. But as labor icon Joe Hill said just before he was executed by Utah authorities for his unionizing activities, "Don't mourn, organize." It's time for working families to organize again for the revitalization of the middle class.

Thanks for the thread, marmar.

[TBF]

5. It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

Emiliano Zapata

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emiliano_Zapata

[femrap]

6. k and r

WASF.....and Jim knows it.

[Enthusiast]

7. K&R This is a great article.

Citizens do not understand what the world was like before collective bargaining and social security. The American people have been so dummied down that they do not recognize without some checks on corporate influence there would be no middle class. Republicans and Teabaggers in particular are operating under the misconception that corporations are some sort of benevolent and patriotic entity.

[spicegal]

8. Corporations are all about short term profits, not long term

financial health. Poor people don't have money to spend. So, what happens to the our country then? What happens to their wealth? Guess they'll find other countries to exploit, since it's all global now.

[johnlucas]

9. The middle class is & has always been an illusion

When they started calling some of the working class "The Middle Class", it began a separation between the two in yet another prime example of the ultimate strategy, Divide & Conquer.

People in the "Middle Class" began seeing themselves as separate from "The Poor" & "Homeless" thanks to a small measure of luxury.
The elite thought, "let those who had nothing get a little & they'll fight for our side for the end of time."
This is how "The Suburbs" could no longer relate to "The Inner City" & its problems.

True wealth has luxury most people can never imagine.
If Bill Gates & Warren Buffett both had $50 billion in wealth & they lost 99% of that money, they would STILL be ridiculously wealthy at $500 million a piece!
That's a quarter of a $2 billion Oprah!
Who else can lose nearly ALL their funds & still have wealth beyond most people's wildest dreams?
Enough money to serve all of anyone's needs & wants while still leaving some over for retirement & inheritance for their loved ones.

Middle Class money is chump change to the truly wealthy.

The Middle Class defeated ITSELF once it bought into the boogeyman of the "ghetto folks" with their "welfare queens" & such. They defeated THEMSELVES when they voted in Ronald Reagan & stood by while the Unions were broken down & weakened. They defeated THEMSELVES by not fighting for the Second Bill of Rights spoken by Frankie Roosevelt where health care is a human right along with employment with a living wage, fair housing, and education among other sweet socially-beneficial things. They defeated THEMSELVES by not pushing for new energy sources that get the U.S. away from depending on Middle East oil & the subsequent conflicts that come from trying to obtain it. 1973 shoulda taught you something, dammit.

It's like this:
If you work for your money, you are a HAVE-NOT.
If your money works for you, you are a HAVE.

There is no in-between. Yoda says there is no try, there is only do.

Money is a momentum-based system where the more of it you have, the more options you can employ to make more of it.
Once you exceed the cost of living, your money can be used as seeds to sprout new money for the future.
After awhile you're not really working, you're managing your assets & capital.

Unless that is you are at the highest paid of the working class like athletes & entertainers who actually bust their butt on the stage/field for their pay (owners hold more money than they do, of course). But that is a bizarre twilight zone that doesn't address the reality of HAVES & HAVE-NOTS. And remember, the working class allows those athletes & entertainers to gain such a fortune. That's why they usually call those guys "Rich" while the power wielders are "Wealthy" (especially when many superstars lose that fortune over time). These types still fall under the elite's delusions much like the "Middle Class" buying into excess instead of concentrating on the least amongst them.

The Republican Party of today & its "Conservative" philosophy shouldn't even exist right now.
The Second Bill of Rights should have been the Law of the Land by now.

But instead we see the whining Middle Class slowly realizing that they never truly had anything as THEIR jobs are now outsourced for cheap slave labor overseas while they foreclose on their long-held houses. We see them realize that a "student loan" is an embarrassment for any country TRULY seeking to educate its entire populace. We see them futilely try to sell that gas-guzzling SUV that they once bought to impress the neighbors. We see them recognize the ignorance of sprawl in city planning without credence to mass transit & bike routes. We see them spend every bit of meager savings they have ever stored up as major medical emergencies wipe out 401Ks overnight. We see them recognize the utter despair that comes along with dried up opportunities as they drink & drug themselves to sleep each night. We see them in their 40s & 50s trying to get a McJob in the aftermath of these discoveries only to get the "overqualified" line dooming them to their looming suffocating debts.

They realized too late that the woes of "The Poor" & "Homeless" are their own as well.
But it never hit home until it hit THEIR home.

So now what? Now that they are beginning to buy a clue, what will they do?
Will they fight in solidarity with those they saw as "under" them? Or will they continue clinging onto that illusion called "The American Dream" with its white picket fence, 2.4 children & a doghouse in the backyard?

Will they continue their Flight or will they Fight for what's right?
John Lucas

P.S.: Labor Day was fought with BLOOD, the red kind. Some idle wealthy woman (with blueblood) came up with that line about not wearing white after that day. Keep it real.

[Jakes Progress]

10. Kick for Jim. Another source of truth and honor.

He represents what the Democratic party was meant to be.

[democracy1st]

11. kick