Main Street America - by Mr. Fish MECHANIC FALLS, Maine – I am sitting in Eric Heimel’s barbershop in the center of Mechanic Falls. Russ Day, who was the owner for 52 years before he sold it to Eric, cut my hair as a boy. The shop looks the same. The mounted trout on the walls. The worn linoleum floor. The 1956 Emil J. Paidar barber chair. The two American flags on the wall flanking the oval mirror. The plaque that reads: “If a Man is Alone In the Woods, With No Woman to Hear Him, Is He Still Wrong?” Another plaque that reads: “Men have 3 hairstyles parted…unparted…and DEPARTED!” I can almost see my grandfather, with his thick gold masonic ring on his pinky finger smoking an unfiltered Camel cigarette, waiting for Russ to finish.
The white working class is fighting permanent marginalization and exile from the economic mainstream. These are people who feel left behind, forsaken by a technocratic system that forces them to live on the periphery of society because they’re not in custody of the credentials that are treated as an indication of social value, which precludes them from an economy that reserves its rewards for those with higher education.
This gives rise to a collective sense of hopelessness, which is why small towns like Mechanic Falls often have such a high rate of "deaths of despair." It's a little known fact that the white working class has been dying at an unprecedented rate. No other country has seen a comparable turnaround in any demographic, and this midlife mortality reversal has been confined to white people. By 2015, so many working-age white Americans were dying that life expectancy in the wealthiest country in the world fell for the first time in nearly a century. I wrote about this here:
Sure Frank. I never heard the Jan 6 insurgents as "privileged" they had the same masters as working class poor blacks. The same masters that used race as a divide and conquer move to weaken unions and wage demands. LBJ once said "if you tell a poor white Texas sharecropper he is better than a ni--er, you can rob his pockets forever". The building blocks of American fascism uses race wedge issues that they themselves designed. The term "woke" is a throw back to "ni--er lover" that Nixon used after LBJ's civil rights in the sixties. The "Southern Strategy" brought in racist democrats and the war on drugs, that Reagan pounced on. His John Birch industrialists ran roughshod over small towns like Chris's, he destroyed union power starting with the Air Traffic Controllers strike. The rust belt grew exponentially ever since and company towns were destroyed and work sent over seas. The democrats under Clinton threw the working class under the bus along with Obama and Biden. A confused working class mostly white but black too attached themselves to Trump in desperation. Demagoguery uses racial scapegoating as the problem allowing the real problem of income inequality to escape critical analysis. Until working class black and white unite for a true democracy, Lincolns words of "united we stand divided we fall" will be Americas future. The "un-woke" are being used as useful idiots by the Power Elite. The time for a united working class third party is long over due! The danger of more Trump like demagogues is all too real and morphing before our eyes, while democracy is being dismantled by stealth.
jim harper, for what it's worth, - because I only got up less than an hour ago, - I must tell you that your words, "Until working class black and white unite for a true democracy, Lincolns words of 'united we stand divided we fall' will be Americas future", are the truest words I've read today. Well said!
When you have a party and current admin telling blacks they are hopeless and that “white supremacy” is out to get them and that it’s systemic, we will never be together. Biden the uniter. What a joke.
Hey Jim. Where have you been buddy? They are white males. According to the most favored political media narrative that makes them privileged. They are oppressors to the collection of victim groups that comprise the modern Democrat power base.
I don't know Frank I am a white male myself, you confuse "privilege" with the fact that "black lives don't matter" and driving while black or stop and frisk doesn't affect us. The white privileged are the robber baron class that set up the absurdity of different races and blacks are 3/5 humans. Poor whites joined in and were the over searers, slave patrols and lyncher's . We will never know what it is like to be automatically viewed with suspicion. Until we admit our past sins racism will never end.
Jim, an aside so you know the rest of us can parse the "logic" here. Your opponent's assumptions are obvious. From his superior perch, he can see everything that's wrong with all of those silly victim letters; you know, LGBTQ, BIPOC, and worst of all F. Of course he doesn't see how whitesplaining and mansplaining might possibly not be so well received by those for whom he is so sure he is best able to speak.
Lest he think I'm one a them libs.... I spent 25+ years as a blue collar worker and labor activist. I was trained in the late '60s by people who'd been union organizers in the 1930s. They told me: "liberals are the ones who leave the room when the fight starts." I never forgot that.
I fought the usurpation of the Dem party by the centrists, professional elite econ status quo apologists who ditched the New Deal. Who did for the Rust Belt what they did to the '08 Wall St. vultures--NOTHING! I've despised the Ivy D elite for many, many decades. F.L. is not saying anything new; maybe we activists in the political trenches and on the picket lines were as invisible to him and to the elitist right wing libertarians as they are to the D elite.
I also qualify as several of the aforementioned letters. I know from long experience, as do many of us, that we can have several active identities. My working class identity is not out of some armchair theory or statistical abstracts. I've actually used tools for a living. Some of us can read, write, and think--we don't need some dog whistle wielding manipulator trying to convince us that those of us who are white are the real victims and everyone else of the same class is a lying fake. A term from the '30s: Labor Faker. Frankly, we know 'em when we see (or read) 'em.
Agreed Rafi. The Neo Liberalism and Neo Conservatism have become one and the same. Biden is an old Dixie Crat and is the most far right law and order chicken hawk they could crown when Bernie scared the crap out of them. Much like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, they used weaponized Anti Semitism to take him down. Case and point Margaret Thatcher when asked in her retirement to name her greatest achievement from the perspective of the Tory hard right replied "Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds". Thatcher understood that her right-wing legacy couldn't be cemented using her own Conservative Party alone. Blair continued privatization using Private Finance Initiatives PFI and so called Public-Private Partnership. So too Clinton!
There you have it. Jim is one of them wokesters. Now I know I can ignore you.
Read up buddy. Cynical Theories, and Woke Racism are a couple of good books that might help you. There is no material systemic racism in this country. Has not been for a few decades. There is a big play by those that wrecked the economy for the working class to make up mythological fake causes so people like you latch onto them and thus not target the actual source.
The black community is a mess because of decades of failed liberal policies based on the soft bigotry of low expectations (the real racism) and corporatism... the socialist impulse that derives from the former. Because without the government support for all that corporate consolidation, it would not happen.
Did you know for example, that four giant American corporations control 80% of the American meat industry? The original anti-trust rules were put into place precisely because of a previous consolidation of the American meat industry. The benchmark for control was set at 40%. So why are we not breaking up those giant corporations? We are not because of the politics of our government, or Democrat and old establishment GOP-controlled government, don't want to because they benefit from the money flow and cooperation of those giant corporations.
This model repeats. The black community and the rural white community have the same problem in that the elites are looting and rent-seeking the country to an empty shell from their moated castle while the plebs fight for the scraps outside the walls. The black family has been destroyed by the loss of middle-class economic opportunity at the very time they were poised to enter the middle class. And the existing middle class also got hammered by the losses.
It has nothing to do with racism, cops and any other excuse you people can manufacture.
What the hell are you talking about was Jim Crow not real? Vagrancy laws to jail blacks for chain gangs for road work and crop picking. As for the corporate control over both races that is the problem, fighting amongst ourselves and using blacks for scabs was a win win for their Machiavellian ends. As for the meat packing industry I agree. Read Upton Sinclair's book "The Jungle" for a hideous expose. A journalist once said "Chicago is a little piece of Hell" to Chicago's chagrin after investigating, when he left he readjusted his view and said "Hell is a little piece of Chicago".
Who doesn’t admit the sins of racism? After admitting and repenting comes redemption. Then you move on, something that the left doesn’t understand. Do we all need to climb up on a cross and be guilt ridden until we die?
Surly you jest the Jim Crow south still hasn't admitted it. De Santos is burning books and his war on knowledge besmirches the left with the tidy red baiting word of "woke". After all to him slavery taught slaves a trade. He might as well have said whipping was good too as it builds up scars and protects them in the sun when they pick cotton. According the right Jesus climbed up on a cross for our sins. The guilt of slavery was never accepted and the first movie made was a propaganda screed of lies, distortions with bare footed blacks portrayed as mere monkeys that wanted to rape all the white women. The white Knight KKK saviors were portrayed as heroes. Far from being guilt ridden until they died. they lynched blacks into the 60's including returning soldiers. That said I will move on.
Your rhetoric creates racism. Telling blacks its systemic racism, while blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime, many of attacks on each other. That’s what they need to know is true. The boogie man of “systemic racism” needs to go away so these communities can come up with a plan to stop mayhem and take full responsibility for their communities messing it up with hoodlum culture, low expectations and absent fathers, and be the catalyst for real change, not pandering.
Sure Craig. I guess the 6 Mississippi cops called the "Goon Squad" were just showing them some "tough love" when they beat, tortured, tasered, humiliated, sexually assaulted and one shot in the mouth and the bullet came out behind his ear to teach them a lesson! But hey your regurgitated KKK like talking points just show you are an "All American" boy. Mississippi is by far the most racist state and has NEVER sent a cop to jail for beating and abusing their authority over black men. Ever hear of "red lining"? Ever hear of segregated schools one in dilapidated inferior schools? Do you have to guess who got the short end of the stick? Public swimming pools that were actually closed and filled in rather than shared with black skinned "gorillas". (normal racist term by "crackers") Southern Unions weakened or non existent because they didn't want them to be paid equally. Poverty built in and no where to turn but low paying blue collar jobs like cleaning ladies, domestics, janitors and garbage men. MLK supported the garbage men strike after 2 black men were crushed to death in the compacting arm, because they weren't allowed in the cab even when raining. Two court house Bibles one for black hands the other for whites. Drastically overblown jail sentences and young boys sentenced as adults. Ghetto's that were underfunded and in many cases bulldozed to ram Interstate highways through their neighborhoods destroying family ties. AS for fatherhood how well did slave owning white men treat their black children? Word has it they were used for collateral for bank loans, sold down the river and pretty daughters sent to New Orleans whore houses. But hey I see where your coming from "its their own fault" for being born the wrong color! Case and point, if you had to do it all over again. Would you want to be born black or white?
It’s Marxism that uses race wars. Lincoln was a Republican. The Klan was democrats. Logging had nothing to do with unions, it was leftists who shut down our forests. And of course LBJ was a democrat. Now you have the premier racist democrat as president. “Obama” is articulate, and clean. If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black” Biden quotes. That was a few years ago when he could form full sentences. Reagan of course, the only union boss elected president. Wokes who think it fine to mutilate minors bodies. What is that a throwback to? Bleeding patients with leeches?
Marxism is about social classes, not race. Racism has always been our main stain and has nothing to do with political affiliation. Lincoln had to struggle with his own racism and the Klan didn't even know they were racist.
I suspect that racism could be the result of what Sigismund Freud called the narcissism of minor differences in his book "Civilization and its Discontents" and is another way to vent out our frustration of having to act according to the rules imposed by living in a community and not being able to act as our base instincts desire.
This is the reason I believe that education for the racist will change their behavior. Particularly education in genetics that will prove to them we all are the same no matter the color of the skin or accents or beliefs. All the inhabitants of this world descended from one woman in Africa who lived about 180,000 years ago: our mitochondrial Eve. In addition, nobody is a purebred. I'm sure that if our American racist had a genetic test it would show that their percentage of white, black and red ancestry is quite different from what they believe they are. During the 530 yrs. Since Columbus stumbled into the Americas, 21 generations have passed (using the conservative estimation of 25 yrs each.) This means that every current American has had over 2 million direct ancestors that have contributed with their genes and blood to their genetic makeup. So, show me one purebred individual whose ancestors in America or Europe never mixed. If so, they must have lived isolated in caves and in incestuous relations.
We better acknowledge the damage that racism is doing to our society and take measures to abolish it.
Not only are they bad racist white people, they are fascists too. Got to hand it to those liberal white college girls running the MSM show, after watching the men they hate get put down by economic policies like China in the WTO and NAFTA, they put on their girl-sized jackboots to step on those male necks to finish the job.
Frank - so many false issues you got going on in your head. I'm sorry. Time for the black helicopters to confiscate your guns and stove and steaks and impose a bug diet?
There is a lot of socio-economic data that supports "the narrative" you criticize.
Narratives that lack evidentiary support are false narratives, or lies, like the manufactured lie that Jan 6 riot was unrelated to the Trump conspiracy to reverse the results of the election (the Eastman memo outlines that strategy:
The Trump fetish lefty men have is odd. They keep talking about him like he is in control of the world while leftists are in control. It seems it may be some subliminal physical or power attraction to him, because they can’t drop it.
I see you don't read. It's the TEXT of the memo, you idiot. CNN didn't write anything, Eastman did. That was just the quickest Google link to the text of the memo. Read it moron. A Mindless attack on source.
Advice. Never quote anything from CNN if you want to maintain any credibility of being objective and not a left propagandized clone. More advice: if you are trying to make a case that tilts one direction of politics, find your backing in a resource that tend to tilt the other direction.
And doing a quick Google search to confirm your confirmation bias is also not a good look. Critical thinking requires a bit more work.
Frank - can you read? It does not matter if the verbatim text of a legal document I distributed but the Wall Street Journal or The Nation or Jacobin. That's not confirming bias or bad sourcing you idiot.
You were the lazy anti-intellectual one here who failed to even read the text, based on the source.
Thanks, Chris. A beautiful piece, reminiscent of a previous nation from previous time with people working together for the Democratic way. Or so we thought. Yes these people have been betrayed, clearly. And are struggling to survive in a nation that has cast them aside. While the wealthy and connected play their stupid games in DC. We must bring each other along, together.
My daughter was a top student in her high school, and an all-state clarinetist. Also South Dakota Burger King Employee of the Year while working "part-time" My wife and I adopted her from China when I was 54, a Certified Speech/Language Pathologist on reservation schools and my wife 47, an MAPT in home care. We told her from early on that if she wanted to go to college her best shot would be via the military, since college was not really worth it in terms of the debt from loans, and we needed the money in our retirement accounts. She scored in the top 5% on the ASVAB, and is now an E6 in the USAF, getting free college and shooting for a degree in Electrical Engineering. She's going to make the Air Force a career, because of the free health care. I guess my point is, why should someone so bright and gritty have to make life decisions based on health care? I'm not militaristic by any means, but something's terribly wrong when the best option available to a child of what used to be the middle class is the military. In days of yore, this is the kind of person who might have stayed in Rapid City, worked through college and become a teacher or nurse and given something back to the community, which is swiftly becoming a retirement community for upper middle class people who are driving up housing prices as they cash out on their over-priced homes in their suburban enclaves.
Did I think DJT was a buffoon who could barely string together a coherent sentence? Yes. Do I agree with his (apparent) views on trade agreements and on actually talking to China and Russia without demanding that the US reserves the right to make all decisions on anything affecting our corporate interests? Also yes. Right now I feel like an FDR Democrat who has been sold out by every portion of the political caste.
"'m not militaristic by any means, but something's terribly wrong when the best option available to a child of what used to be the middle class is the military."
This is entirely intentional. Recently, some Congressman said it out loud, that wages needed to be kept low so that poor people will want to serve in the military.
That was her ides or did she have 2 liberal parent’s whining about it her whole life. Certainly it does not make sense. I don’t know any Electronic Engineers paying for health care. The self employed are the ones getting killed. My last year I paid $2300 a month for my 4 person family, and thousands more for employees. She would make way more in the private sector. Sounds made up or just the imagination of a 20 year old.
I'm from there, too. 5th generation western WA, the descendant of a long line of loggers. A blue collar worker for 25+ years, I endured my share of sniffing dismissals by upper middle class professionals, a liberal elite astounded that some of us can speak, let alone that some of us can think.
But no, it wasn't just those pesky environmentalists. Go to anywhere where logging was primary; look around. How many old growth trees do you see?! Yeah, they're renewable--if you wait a few hundred years. At least my ancestors didn't clear-cut, which wrecks soil ecology and results in the re-planting of a badly simplified arboreal monoculture.
I remember when we workers were "personnel," you know, persons. Now we're "human resources," things to be strip-mined and clear-cut, the unprofitable remains simply tossed aside. According to the accounting standards of corporations, devastated communities and destroyed ecosystems are externalities. They don't count.
I also remember the late '70s when the centrists (neolibs) usurped the Dem Party--I fought them. They ditched the New Deal and abandoned labor; thereby the entire majority working class. The D rightward march helped enable the Rs to go full on fascist.
And I remember the words of my logger grandfather. He was a Wobbly (I.W.W.--look it up) and obviously he could think. The IWW motto: AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL.
Through the '70s, the old New Deal mentality still prevailed--people who worked in govt. at whatever level were serving other citizens. Then the biz school grads began to dominate govt. mgt. Now corporate types and heads of govt. agencies move back and forth. Corporations and 1%ers sponsor both parties, and the resulting elected officials determine govt. policies. Whose interests are likely to prevail?
There are some good people in regulatory agencies and social services, but they're underfunded and constantly interfered with. We have no established political allies by which to bring back another New Deal. Despite my innate idealism, I cannot see govt. as friend. Or any huge centralized organization for that matter.
It’s incredibly sad that so many people are suffering like this. I was just thinking this morning about the economy people in their 30s and 40s are facing. I remember when young people didn’t have to bankrupt or indenture themselves to outrageous student loans, they could open a business. The town was full of small businesses -- florists, bookstores, shoe stores, clothing, sports equipment, furniture, and everything else imaginable. My mom would take us shopping. It wasn’t that inconvenient, it got us out of the house and we got to see the people living in our town. In the 80s it started to change, first the big box stores destroyed jobs and businesses, and then companies started moving their factories overseas. Then the internet took what was left. I follow a lot of young people on YouTube and they are resourceful and creative and do brilliant work. But very few will be able to afford houses and families and a decent retirement. Generations of lives gutted, all to make things a few cents cheaper. It’s a crime.
What a nice comment. We can all participate in small ways. I’ve never eaten at a McDonald’s, never entered a Walmart, and have never bought anything from Amazon. It’s not virtue signaling, it’s a practical choice which has cost me nothing and perhaps benefited the community.
Beautifully said, and achingly sad. Things aren’t very different in rural Pennsylvania. The manufacturing industry has disappeared, young people go away to college and never come back, the ones that stay barely make ends meet. Substance abuse makes its way into every family. And how much money do we send to Washington just so they can turn around and give it to the warmongers?
I share your thoughts and I am sure the sadness. It hurts to read news that is so devastating. The poor man has little hope and the wealthy have little care.
Devastating. And I don't see a turnaround. When JFK threatened to beak the CIA into thousand pieces, that's when this whole mess got started. JFK, RFK... and now RFK, jr ?John Perkins book, 'Confessions of an Economic Hit Man' was deep. I often wondered when, after screwing over the world around foreign countries... when would those same elements take on the USA ? It's happened. We're there now. A hollowed out country that will vote to increase its military budget to a trillion dollars this year. Eisenhower warned about the 'Military industrial Complex'.
No one should wonder that so many are depressed even when they still live well enough but just knowing so many are fighting to survive everyday in more ways then we imagine. How are the children going to survive, even the ones with a good education. Desperation is spreading across America. The few new plants or factories will never make up for the hundreds that are gone.
America is a disintegrating society . Corporations rule. Working-class consciousness and solidarity were smashed by the ruling class long ago. Neoliberal capitalism finished it off - see Noam Chomsky on this. Hedge’s article is beautifully written, straight to the point and poignant. He is one of the truly great journalists.
Frank - you ask: "what does breaking the CIA have to do with destroyed working class economic opportunity?"
The CIA is the muscle that supports the capitalist mob that manages the US Empire. That Empire has de-industrialized the US, exported investment and jobs, imposed austerity, and exploited the people and natural resources of the world. Read John Perkins' book "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" to understand how all this works to crush the working class.
Defense spending is obscene. The Soviet Union ("Evil Empire") and Warsaw Pact are gone, so defense spending should have dropped dramatically to reflect the reduced threat (AKA "the peace dividend"). Instead, your CIA boys manufacture color revolutions, US interventions, and spawn new terrorists threats (read "Blowback" by Chalmers Johnson or "War Is a Racket" by USMC General Smedley Butler or "War Is the Health of The State" by Randolph Bourne).
Your evaluation metric is absurd as well (i.e. defense spending as a percent of GDP). Spending should reflect real military threat, not the greed of corporate arms manufacturers and the MIC.
Naw Bill, spending per GDP is the ONLY metric that matters in debating spending as otherwise we allow emotive hyperbole to replace objective reasoning. You should really spend some time reading the government's historical budget tables. A wealth of information that will allow you to power through your Google and CNN addiction you need to help you feel like the smartest guy in the room.
The CIA involvement in the breaking of working class economic opportunity is secondary to their masters whom are the academic and moneyed elites that demanded that we export working class economic opportunity to other countries (while importing other country's poverty for the cheap labor) in the expectation that they would be made less envious and less prone to global violence, while also expanding the global consumer base to fill the pockets of the corporatists.
Sure the American war industrial complex is part of that... but only a part of that. Wall Street in general is the bigger part of that. So are the ivory tower ivy-league graduates from the wealthy families that go into to government and policy jobs.
They fucked it all up. That is the message in this piece by Chris.
Now, what do they do about it?... they become modern Democrats connected with the WEF globalist Great Reset and Agenda 2030 which requires that US industrial might be eradicated and the independent worker and small business be wiped out to be replaced with a global corporatocracy and a completely UBI-dependent population... and the become committed to the final coup-de-grace dispatching those racist neofascist white working-class people.
Your "capitalist" system never was "yours" Frank unless you were born into the .1% . The same ones that are War Profiteers. The US permeant war economy devours your money and children both physically and mentally. I don't know where you get your statistics but military spending has gone through the roof since WW2. The MIC "gun belt" that snakes through America, state after state has created "arms" junkies. Weening the economy and the jobs they create has become political suicide. Clinging to these jobs in desperation that create death and destruction is folly. As Eisenhower said how many schools, hospitals, bridges and roads could be built instead of the expense of just one aircraft carrier?
Come on Frank...who runs the country ? Some say Big Pharma. The Military Industrial Complex does. The CIA was, and is, a part of the MIC. They do the covert dirty work at home and abroad. So when JFK threatened to break apart the CIA, he was threatening the true powerbase. So they eliminated him... and his brother. The Pentagon cannot account for at least 21 Trillion Dollars, and no problem. Do you count the 21 trillion in your factoring about defense spending and GDP ? I bet not. The moves the MIC have made over time has hollowed out economic opportunity... by design. Do you think the FED operates independently of the MIC ? Fat chance. Who ordered the Covid vaxxes ? The DOD. They were termed bio-medical countermeasures. All weapons ordered by the military (AKA: The Military Industrial Complex) are called 'countermeasures'.
If the US population is 331.9 million in 2021, the median income in 2021 is USD 97,962, then to pay for the 2023 Defence department appropriation with that money would take 30.8% of the average person’s income. Nobody has ever invaded America, except initially as a refugee or involuntarily as a slave, which latter doesn’t count; and that’s maybe all of you but the decimated indigenous populations, yet you spend that proportion of your incomes on defence?
Is this because it’s very important to beat up communists to keep the world open for capitalism?
‘Just checking. ‘Glad to hear the proportion spent on defence has dropped, though. Losing just 30.8% of your disposable income must make life so much more manageable.
Military spending is 2/3 of all government spending Craig. How about the rich war profiteers paying ALL the freight for war as they are the ones who profit from it. 800 foreign bases to protect American Interests, which is code for corporate interests. All of them are tax and war dodgers, that send the poor and working class, mostly from flyover country of the Midwest and South. The 50% of the US average persons has less wealth than the top 5 robber barons and the .1% who have most of the other 50% could pay for war without lowering their lifestyle in the least.
Jim, That’s a good stat if it were true. The problem with leftists, is they spread falsehoods, which if true, would be earth shattering. The feds paid 877 billion in 2022 on military out of a budget of 6.4 trillion. About 14 percent. You do this to manipulate emotions. The problem is that your fun facts and others are almost never true.
Everyone is subject to the same rules. The rich don't have some secret breaks. Whatever you imagine, the rich continue to pay almost all of our taxes. If you keep telling them they "don't pay their fair share, it doesn't help. You should be praising them for paying your taxes if you are in the 50% who pay none.
Really? Craig, do you still believe that we live in a society with equal rules for everybody? Perhaps only in paper. I pay more federal taxes than poor Trump. And for the rest of the rich people, that you praise so much, in percentage of my income I pay much more than them whose share in our scarce resources is bigger. And let us not forget the enforcement of the law. The average man that would have committed the financial and sex crimes of Trump would have been sitting in a jail long ago. Good for you that you live in such fantasies but denial is what is leading our collapse. My opinion, of course.
The Panama papers prove different. Ever heard of Swiss bank accounts or offshore accounts. How about when the corporations brought the billions of profits sitting in tax havens like Ireland only after retro active tax cuts were passed by Trump and the Republican congress. After all the profits had been calculated and tax requirements, only to renege and blackmail the government. Greed is Good?
Correction, nobody has ever invaded America successfully; I acknowledge that it has been attacked by Japan and by Jihadis, albeit both parties might claim this was a form of resistance to American economic and cultural hegemony, and argue provocation. So some residual level of preparedness for invasion is bound to be retained.
If you're of a certain age, you watched the betrayal of working people happen in real time, and if you're a working person, you know at some level that no political party has your interests in mind. Wealth became more prized than work. It started with Jimmy Carter, but reached its apogee under Bill Clinton's reign. I empathize with the feeling of betrayal, the anger, but feel it's directed at the wrong targets. It's not women, gays, drag queens, Blacks, Mexicans, immigrants -- it's bankers and hedge fund honchos and tech bros and Republicans and Democrats in Congress; it's a media that couldn't care less about working people; and it's a capitalist system that preys on people.
Nixon, Reagan, Dubya and Trump had a hand in too! Republicans and Democrat Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. Truman. Eisenhower and JFK have some "splaining" too!
The Dem apologist line is to blame the Reagan years. People now in their 50s only vaguely remember those years and for sure nothing prior. So it sounds plausible the R rightward turn meant the Ds reluctantly had to respond. Truth is the "centrists" (neolib advocates of econopathy) were staging an unfriendly take-over of the D party by the late '70s. They got rid of the New Deal and abandoned labor. And the D move rightward helped enable the outright fascism of the Rs. Since the current admin Ds have now allied with the neocons (State Dept.) I wonder if that wasn't the goal all along.
My heart hurts reading about the people left over there. Truly they were left when the plants closed, when no one cared, when nothing remains to help them survive. This decay is spread across our nation and little is being done, the need is enormous. What rankles me is that we send billions to Ukraine, to Israel we spread weapons of mass destruction anywhere we can sell them. The seeds of disaster have taken root in our land. Meanwhile corporate CEOs etc. Politicians, big investors care only to satisfy their greed for power and wealth. We cannot expect to grow healthy citizens who are respectful of each other in an atmosphere like this. What the hell kind of world awaits my 2 year old great grandchild.
Fighting the biggest most prolonged and professionally run propaganda machine humankind has ever seen will take a serious serious effort to overcome. Not sure how any popular social uprising can surmount let alone defeat this single biggest mind fuck any population has ever endured. 70 years of diligent and subtle propaganda that has so utterly divided and conquered its own populace is a sight to behold from outside the bubble. The task so enormous and the parties effected so disparate it will be a miracle to achieve.
Vast 'Negative Externality Cost' Looting and deadly inequality caused by the 973 ruling billionaire bastards has finally killed America and our only fragile little world --- as Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his:
REQUIEM
The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
“Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do.”
The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
Vonnegut, Kurt. A Man Without a Country (Kindle Locations 931-936). Seven Stories Press. Kindle Edition.
I think this is the best thing I’ve ever read from this important writer.
Yesterday I was telling a liberal friend that if my car broke down I’d rather it happened in a broke down working class village than anywhere in Beverly Hills or Aspen.
It’s time to go back to our roots and understand that we need each other if we’re ever going to get close to where we want to be.
My water pump failed in a small rural Montana town - the only garage in town - no others for 100 miles - charged me almost $900 to fix it. How do you like them apples?
Water pumps driven by timing belts is a big job at least 4-5 hours plus belt pulleys, pump and coolant. The price of apples was in the design from the auto makers. Who also chisel the time allowed for the flat rate wage of the mechanic.
Chris: This is a heart-warming essay celebrating a kind of survival against the odds and in the midst of ongoing tribulations of what one might call "ordinary" extraordinary people - the latter being the truth of us all in our unique individual stories. One of the things I noticed overall was the connection to flags and wartime experiences and the need to believe in one's country - no matter how that country seems to treat its citizens. There were three other things which stood out. The service in WWII in Guadalcanal (referenced in the musical "South Pacific"). When I lived in western Japan I taught three generations of one family - the accountant grand-mother's father was Admiral TANAKA Raizō whose ship was in that same zone. Post-war he spent much of his time caring for his men who had survived - and in the neighbourhood to where I lived a memorial cemetery to local graduates of the naval Academy just to the east of Hiroshima-city on Etajima who had died in the Pacific - on the standing stones with their names I read over and over 「グアダルカナル」Guadalcanal. Then you referenced Agent Orange. Two months back I was in Viet Nam and I visited two Art Centres where many of the artists at work creating beautiful pieces were victims to 2nd generation of Agent Orange DNA physical deformities. Dropped all over the north during what they call "The American War"! And the other was the reference - oblique though it was - in a sense - to the sole mariner disappearing between the Cook Islands and the western South Pacific island continent - my home - Australia. Thank you for the celebration of those otherwise ignored in the grander national narratives. One other thing - I am now well into Judith L Herman's Trauma and Recovery - following your interview of her recently. I mentioned it to Dean YATES - his own book riding high in the national Top 20 titles at present - published just a few weeks back. "Line in the Sand" - about his recovery from PTSD and/or Moral Injury - out of his Reuters journalism - at the Bali Bombing, at the Boxing Day tsunami on Sumatra - and in Baghdad as Bureau chief when the Apache gunship killed some of his staff - the "Collateral Damage" video of which Chelsea Manning passed on to WikiLeaks - and so the unedifying pursuit of Julian Assange still in progress. His reply: "Trauma and Recovery is one of the best books on trauma I've ever read. I've found it so helpful on my journey. Judith Herman's latest book Trauma and Repair (2023) is also fascinating." Thanks again, Chris.
The white working class is fighting permanent marginalization and exile from the economic mainstream. These are people who feel left behind, forsaken by a technocratic system that forces them to live on the periphery of society because they’re not in custody of the credentials that are treated as an indication of social value, which precludes them from an economy that reserves its rewards for those with higher education.
This gives rise to a collective sense of hopelessness, which is why small towns like Mechanic Falls often have such a high rate of "deaths of despair." It's a little known fact that the white working class has been dying at an unprecedented rate. No other country has seen a comparable turnaround in any demographic, and this midlife mortality reversal has been confined to white people. By 2015, so many working-age white Americans were dying that life expectancy in the wealthiest country in the world fell for the first time in nearly a century. I wrote about this here:
https://www.euphoricrecall.net/p/requiem-for-the-american-dream
Yeah Brad, but according to the common political media narrative, these people are racist and Jan-6 insurgents and privileged.
Sure Frank. I never heard the Jan 6 insurgents as "privileged" they had the same masters as working class poor blacks. The same masters that used race as a divide and conquer move to weaken unions and wage demands. LBJ once said "if you tell a poor white Texas sharecropper he is better than a ni--er, you can rob his pockets forever". The building blocks of American fascism uses race wedge issues that they themselves designed. The term "woke" is a throw back to "ni--er lover" that Nixon used after LBJ's civil rights in the sixties. The "Southern Strategy" brought in racist democrats and the war on drugs, that Reagan pounced on. His John Birch industrialists ran roughshod over small towns like Chris's, he destroyed union power starting with the Air Traffic Controllers strike. The rust belt grew exponentially ever since and company towns were destroyed and work sent over seas. The democrats under Clinton threw the working class under the bus along with Obama and Biden. A confused working class mostly white but black too attached themselves to Trump in desperation. Demagoguery uses racial scapegoating as the problem allowing the real problem of income inequality to escape critical analysis. Until working class black and white unite for a true democracy, Lincolns words of "united we stand divided we fall" will be Americas future. The "un-woke" are being used as useful idiots by the Power Elite. The time for a united working class third party is long over due! The danger of more Trump like demagogues is all too real and morphing before our eyes, while democracy is being dismantled by stealth.
jim harper, for what it's worth, - because I only got up less than an hour ago, - I must tell you that your words, "Until working class black and white unite for a true democracy, Lincolns words of 'united we stand divided we fall' will be Americas future", are the truest words I've read today. Well said!
When you have a party and current admin telling blacks they are hopeless and that “white supremacy” is out to get them and that it’s systemic, we will never be together. Biden the uniter. What a joke.
Hey Jim. Where have you been buddy? They are white males. According to the most favored political media narrative that makes them privileged. They are oppressors to the collection of victim groups that comprise the modern Democrat power base.
Otherwise, great post that I agree with.
I don't know Frank I am a white male myself, you confuse "privilege" with the fact that "black lives don't matter" and driving while black or stop and frisk doesn't affect us. The white privileged are the robber baron class that set up the absurdity of different races and blacks are 3/5 humans. Poor whites joined in and were the over searers, slave patrols and lyncher's . We will never know what it is like to be automatically viewed with suspicion. Until we admit our past sins racism will never end.
Jim, an aside so you know the rest of us can parse the "logic" here. Your opponent's assumptions are obvious. From his superior perch, he can see everything that's wrong with all of those silly victim letters; you know, LGBTQ, BIPOC, and worst of all F. Of course he doesn't see how whitesplaining and mansplaining might possibly not be so well received by those for whom he is so sure he is best able to speak.
Lest he think I'm one a them libs.... I spent 25+ years as a blue collar worker and labor activist. I was trained in the late '60s by people who'd been union organizers in the 1930s. They told me: "liberals are the ones who leave the room when the fight starts." I never forgot that.
I fought the usurpation of the Dem party by the centrists, professional elite econ status quo apologists who ditched the New Deal. Who did for the Rust Belt what they did to the '08 Wall St. vultures--NOTHING! I've despised the Ivy D elite for many, many decades. F.L. is not saying anything new; maybe we activists in the political trenches and on the picket lines were as invisible to him and to the elitist right wing libertarians as they are to the D elite.
I also qualify as several of the aforementioned letters. I know from long experience, as do many of us, that we can have several active identities. My working class identity is not out of some armchair theory or statistical abstracts. I've actually used tools for a living. Some of us can read, write, and think--we don't need some dog whistle wielding manipulator trying to convince us that those of us who are white are the real victims and everyone else of the same class is a lying fake. A term from the '30s: Labor Faker. Frankly, we know 'em when we see (or read) 'em.
Agreed Rafi. The Neo Liberalism and Neo Conservatism have become one and the same. Biden is an old Dixie Crat and is the most far right law and order chicken hawk they could crown when Bernie scared the crap out of them. Much like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, they used weaponized Anti Semitism to take him down. Case and point Margaret Thatcher when asked in her retirement to name her greatest achievement from the perspective of the Tory hard right replied "Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds". Thatcher understood that her right-wing legacy couldn't be cemented using her own Conservative Party alone. Blair continued privatization using Private Finance Initiatives PFI and so called Public-Private Partnership. So too Clinton!
Blue collar labor activists are libs. Didn’t you notice that. How many conservatives at the meetings ?
There you have it. Jim is one of them wokesters. Now I know I can ignore you.
Read up buddy. Cynical Theories, and Woke Racism are a couple of good books that might help you. There is no material systemic racism in this country. Has not been for a few decades. There is a big play by those that wrecked the economy for the working class to make up mythological fake causes so people like you latch onto them and thus not target the actual source.
The black community is a mess because of decades of failed liberal policies based on the soft bigotry of low expectations (the real racism) and corporatism... the socialist impulse that derives from the former. Because without the government support for all that corporate consolidation, it would not happen.
Did you know for example, that four giant American corporations control 80% of the American meat industry? The original anti-trust rules were put into place precisely because of a previous consolidation of the American meat industry. The benchmark for control was set at 40%. So why are we not breaking up those giant corporations? We are not because of the politics of our government, or Democrat and old establishment GOP-controlled government, don't want to because they benefit from the money flow and cooperation of those giant corporations.
This model repeats. The black community and the rural white community have the same problem in that the elites are looting and rent-seeking the country to an empty shell from their moated castle while the plebs fight for the scraps outside the walls. The black family has been destroyed by the loss of middle-class economic opportunity at the very time they were poised to enter the middle class. And the existing middle class also got hammered by the losses.
It has nothing to do with racism, cops and any other excuse you people can manufacture.
What the hell are you talking about was Jim Crow not real? Vagrancy laws to jail blacks for chain gangs for road work and crop picking. As for the corporate control over both races that is the problem, fighting amongst ourselves and using blacks for scabs was a win win for their Machiavellian ends. As for the meat packing industry I agree. Read Upton Sinclair's book "The Jungle" for a hideous expose. A journalist once said "Chicago is a little piece of Hell" to Chicago's chagrin after investigating, when he left he readjusted his view and said "Hell is a little piece of Chicago".
Who doesn’t admit the sins of racism? After admitting and repenting comes redemption. Then you move on, something that the left doesn’t understand. Do we all need to climb up on a cross and be guilt ridden until we die?
Surly you jest the Jim Crow south still hasn't admitted it. De Santos is burning books and his war on knowledge besmirches the left with the tidy red baiting word of "woke". After all to him slavery taught slaves a trade. He might as well have said whipping was good too as it builds up scars and protects them in the sun when they pick cotton. According the right Jesus climbed up on a cross for our sins. The guilt of slavery was never accepted and the first movie made was a propaganda screed of lies, distortions with bare footed blacks portrayed as mere monkeys that wanted to rape all the white women. The white Knight KKK saviors were portrayed as heroes. Far from being guilt ridden until they died. they lynched blacks into the 60's including returning soldiers. That said I will move on.
Your rhetoric creates racism. Telling blacks its systemic racism, while blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime, many of attacks on each other. That’s what they need to know is true. The boogie man of “systemic racism” needs to go away so these communities can come up with a plan to stop mayhem and take full responsibility for their communities messing it up with hoodlum culture, low expectations and absent fathers, and be the catalyst for real change, not pandering.
Sure Craig. I guess the 6 Mississippi cops called the "Goon Squad" were just showing them some "tough love" when they beat, tortured, tasered, humiliated, sexually assaulted and one shot in the mouth and the bullet came out behind his ear to teach them a lesson! But hey your regurgitated KKK like talking points just show you are an "All American" boy. Mississippi is by far the most racist state and has NEVER sent a cop to jail for beating and abusing their authority over black men. Ever hear of "red lining"? Ever hear of segregated schools one in dilapidated inferior schools? Do you have to guess who got the short end of the stick? Public swimming pools that were actually closed and filled in rather than shared with black skinned "gorillas". (normal racist term by "crackers") Southern Unions weakened or non existent because they didn't want them to be paid equally. Poverty built in and no where to turn but low paying blue collar jobs like cleaning ladies, domestics, janitors and garbage men. MLK supported the garbage men strike after 2 black men were crushed to death in the compacting arm, because they weren't allowed in the cab even when raining. Two court house Bibles one for black hands the other for whites. Drastically overblown jail sentences and young boys sentenced as adults. Ghetto's that were underfunded and in many cases bulldozed to ram Interstate highways through their neighborhoods destroying family ties. AS for fatherhood how well did slave owning white men treat their black children? Word has it they were used for collateral for bank loans, sold down the river and pretty daughters sent to New Orleans whore houses. But hey I see where your coming from "its their own fault" for being born the wrong color! Case and point, if you had to do it all over again. Would you want to be born black or white?
Do police stop and frisk blacks out of racism or statistics?
Both, Statistics prove racism.
It’s Marxism that uses race wars. Lincoln was a Republican. The Klan was democrats. Logging had nothing to do with unions, it was leftists who shut down our forests. And of course LBJ was a democrat. Now you have the premier racist democrat as president. “Obama” is articulate, and clean. If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black” Biden quotes. That was a few years ago when he could form full sentences. Reagan of course, the only union boss elected president. Wokes who think it fine to mutilate minors bodies. What is that a throwback to? Bleeding patients with leeches?
Marxism is about social classes, not race. Racism has always been our main stain and has nothing to do with political affiliation. Lincoln had to struggle with his own racism and the Klan didn't even know they were racist.
I suspect that racism could be the result of what Sigismund Freud called the narcissism of minor differences in his book "Civilization and its Discontents" and is another way to vent out our frustration of having to act according to the rules imposed by living in a community and not being able to act as our base instincts desire.
This is the reason I believe that education for the racist will change their behavior. Particularly education in genetics that will prove to them we all are the same no matter the color of the skin or accents or beliefs. All the inhabitants of this world descended from one woman in Africa who lived about 180,000 years ago: our mitochondrial Eve. In addition, nobody is a purebred. I'm sure that if our American racist had a genetic test it would show that their percentage of white, black and red ancestry is quite different from what they believe they are. During the 530 yrs. Since Columbus stumbled into the Americas, 21 generations have passed (using the conservative estimation of 25 yrs each.) This means that every current American has had over 2 million direct ancestors that have contributed with their genes and blood to their genetic makeup. So, show me one purebred individual whose ancestors in America or Europe never mixed. If so, they must have lived isolated in caves and in incestuous relations.
We better acknowledge the damage that racism is doing to our society and take measures to abolish it.
According to the MSM, they deserve it.
Not only are they bad racist white people, they are fascists too. Got to hand it to those liberal white college girls running the MSM show, after watching the men they hate get put down by economic policies like China in the WTO and NAFTA, they put on their girl-sized jackboots to step on those male necks to finish the job.
Frank - so many false issues you got going on in your head. I'm sorry. Time for the black helicopters to confiscate your guns and stove and steaks and impose a bug diet?
You are a dipshit.
You are not a social misfit, just someone who can think normal thoughts.
There is a lot of socio-economic data that supports "the narrative" you criticize.
Narratives that lack evidentiary support are false narratives, or lies, like the manufactured lie that Jan 6 riot was unrelated to the Trump conspiracy to reverse the results of the election (the Eastman memo outlines that strategy:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/21/politics/read-eastman-memo/index.html
The Trump fetish lefty men have is odd. They keep talking about him like he is in control of the world while leftists are in control. It seems it may be some subliminal physical or power attraction to him, because they can’t drop it.
LOL. CNN. Geesh Bill, this would elevate your status as a top-shelf critical thinker if sarcastic. Alas, we see it is not.
I see you don't read. It's the TEXT of the memo, you idiot. CNN didn't write anything, Eastman did. That was just the quickest Google link to the text of the memo. Read it moron. A Mindless attack on source.
Advice. Never quote anything from CNN if you want to maintain any credibility of being objective and not a left propagandized clone. More advice: if you are trying to make a case that tilts one direction of politics, find your backing in a resource that tend to tilt the other direction.
And doing a quick Google search to confirm your confirmation bias is also not a good look. Critical thinking requires a bit more work.
Frank - can you read? It does not matter if the verbatim text of a legal document I distributed but the Wall Street Journal or The Nation or Jacobin. That's not confirming bias or bad sourcing you idiot.
You were the lazy anti-intellectual one here who failed to even read the text, based on the source.
It ain't just the white working class.
Thanks, Chris. A beautiful piece, reminiscent of a previous nation from previous time with people working together for the Democratic way. Or so we thought. Yes these people have been betrayed, clearly. And are struggling to survive in a nation that has cast them aside. While the wealthy and connected play their stupid games in DC. We must bring each other along, together.
The misery was and is created by liberals and environmentalists. They shut down the logging. You don’t read the news?
My daughter was a top student in her high school, and an all-state clarinetist. Also South Dakota Burger King Employee of the Year while working "part-time" My wife and I adopted her from China when I was 54, a Certified Speech/Language Pathologist on reservation schools and my wife 47, an MAPT in home care. We told her from early on that if she wanted to go to college her best shot would be via the military, since college was not really worth it in terms of the debt from loans, and we needed the money in our retirement accounts. She scored in the top 5% on the ASVAB, and is now an E6 in the USAF, getting free college and shooting for a degree in Electrical Engineering. She's going to make the Air Force a career, because of the free health care. I guess my point is, why should someone so bright and gritty have to make life decisions based on health care? I'm not militaristic by any means, but something's terribly wrong when the best option available to a child of what used to be the middle class is the military. In days of yore, this is the kind of person who might have stayed in Rapid City, worked through college and become a teacher or nurse and given something back to the community, which is swiftly becoming a retirement community for upper middle class people who are driving up housing prices as they cash out on their over-priced homes in their suburban enclaves.
Did I think DJT was a buffoon who could barely string together a coherent sentence? Yes. Do I agree with his (apparent) views on trade agreements and on actually talking to China and Russia without demanding that the US reserves the right to make all decisions on anything affecting our corporate interests? Also yes. Right now I feel like an FDR Democrat who has been sold out by every portion of the political caste.
"'m not militaristic by any means, but something's terribly wrong when the best option available to a child of what used to be the middle class is the military."
This is entirely intentional. Recently, some Congressman said it out loud, that wages needed to be kept low so that poor people will want to serve in the military.
You immediately believe the story though it is obviously made up then embellished for shock value. An absurd tale.
Its only the best option for leftists who need the government to go to the bathroom.
"we needed the money in our retirement accounts."
WTF!!!!
There you go. They are probably “ victims.”
That was her ides or did she have 2 liberal parent’s whining about it her whole life. Certainly it does not make sense. I don’t know any Electronic Engineers paying for health care. The self employed are the ones getting killed. My last year I paid $2300 a month for my 4 person family, and thousands more for employees. She would make way more in the private sector. Sounds made up or just the imagination of a 20 year old.
Clear-cutting.
I'm from there, too. 5th generation western WA, the descendant of a long line of loggers. A blue collar worker for 25+ years, I endured my share of sniffing dismissals by upper middle class professionals, a liberal elite astounded that some of us can speak, let alone that some of us can think.
But no, it wasn't just those pesky environmentalists. Go to anywhere where logging was primary; look around. How many old growth trees do you see?! Yeah, they're renewable--if you wait a few hundred years. At least my ancestors didn't clear-cut, which wrecks soil ecology and results in the re-planting of a badly simplified arboreal monoculture.
I remember when we workers were "personnel," you know, persons. Now we're "human resources," things to be strip-mined and clear-cut, the unprofitable remains simply tossed aside. According to the accounting standards of corporations, devastated communities and destroyed ecosystems are externalities. They don't count.
I also remember the late '70s when the centrists (neolibs) usurped the Dem Party--I fought them. They ditched the New Deal and abandoned labor; thereby the entire majority working class. The D rightward march helped enable the Rs to go full on fascist.
And I remember the words of my logger grandfather. He was a Wobbly (I.W.W.--look it up) and obviously he could think. The IWW motto: AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL.
"I don't want your millions, mister / I don't want your diamond rings / All I want is a right to live, mister / Give me back my job again."
Corporations and capitalism are the enemy, not government.
Through the '70s, the old New Deal mentality still prevailed--people who worked in govt. at whatever level were serving other citizens. Then the biz school grads began to dominate govt. mgt. Now corporate types and heads of govt. agencies move back and forth. Corporations and 1%ers sponsor both parties, and the resulting elected officials determine govt. policies. Whose interests are likely to prevail?
There are some good people in regulatory agencies and social services, but they're underfunded and constantly interfered with. We have no established political allies by which to bring back another New Deal. Despite my innate idealism, I cannot see govt. as friend. Or any huge centralized organization for that matter.
Spoken like a government employee
Former, here. Whistleblowing ended that gig.
Great points! (from an intellectual some-time chainsaw operator. )
It’s incredibly sad that so many people are suffering like this. I was just thinking this morning about the economy people in their 30s and 40s are facing. I remember when young people didn’t have to bankrupt or indenture themselves to outrageous student loans, they could open a business. The town was full of small businesses -- florists, bookstores, shoe stores, clothing, sports equipment, furniture, and everything else imaginable. My mom would take us shopping. It wasn’t that inconvenient, it got us out of the house and we got to see the people living in our town. In the 80s it started to change, first the big box stores destroyed jobs and businesses, and then companies started moving their factories overseas. Then the internet took what was left. I follow a lot of young people on YouTube and they are resourceful and creative and do brilliant work. But very few will be able to afford houses and families and a decent retirement. Generations of lives gutted, all to make things a few cents cheaper. It’s a crime.
What a nice comment. We can all participate in small ways. I’ve never eaten at a McDonald’s, never entered a Walmart, and have never bought anything from Amazon. It’s not virtue signaling, it’s a practical choice which has cost me nothing and perhaps benefited the community.
Beautifully said, and achingly sad. Things aren’t very different in rural Pennsylvania. The manufacturing industry has disappeared, young people go away to college and never come back, the ones that stay barely make ends meet. Substance abuse makes its way into every family. And how much money do we send to Washington just so they can turn around and give it to the warmongers?
I share your thoughts and I am sure the sadness. It hurts to read news that is so devastating. The poor man has little hope and the wealthy have little care.
Devastating. And I don't see a turnaround. When JFK threatened to beak the CIA into thousand pieces, that's when this whole mess got started. JFK, RFK... and now RFK, jr ?John Perkins book, 'Confessions of an Economic Hit Man' was deep. I often wondered when, after screwing over the world around foreign countries... when would those same elements take on the USA ? It's happened. We're there now. A hollowed out country that will vote to increase its military budget to a trillion dollars this year. Eisenhower warned about the 'Military industrial Complex'.
No one should wonder that so many are depressed even when they still live well enough but just knowing so many are fighting to survive everyday in more ways then we imagine. How are the children going to survive, even the ones with a good education. Desperation is spreading across America. The few new plants or factories will never make up for the hundreds that are gone.
America is a disintegrating society . Corporations rule. Working-class consciousness and solidarity were smashed by the ruling class long ago. Neoliberal capitalism finished it off - see Noam Chomsky on this. Hedge’s article is beautifully written, straight to the point and poignant. He is one of the truly great journalists.
Neo liberal corporatism combined with illiberal socialist progressivism. We lost our capitalist system years ago.
Huh? Nonsensical. Defense spending per GDP is lower than the average over the last 70 years even removing WWII.
And what does breaking the CIA have to do with destroyed working class economic opportunity?
Frank - you ask: "what does breaking the CIA have to do with destroyed working class economic opportunity?"
The CIA is the muscle that supports the capitalist mob that manages the US Empire. That Empire has de-industrialized the US, exported investment and jobs, imposed austerity, and exploited the people and natural resources of the world. Read John Perkins' book "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" to understand how all this works to crush the working class.
Defense spending is obscene. The Soviet Union ("Evil Empire") and Warsaw Pact are gone, so defense spending should have dropped dramatically to reflect the reduced threat (AKA "the peace dividend"). Instead, your CIA boys manufacture color revolutions, US interventions, and spawn new terrorists threats (read "Blowback" by Chalmers Johnson or "War Is a Racket" by USMC General Smedley Butler or "War Is the Health of The State" by Randolph Bourne).
Your evaluation metric is absurd as well (i.e. defense spending as a percent of GDP). Spending should reflect real military threat, not the greed of corporate arms manufacturers and the MIC.
Naw Bill, spending per GDP is the ONLY metric that matters in debating spending as otherwise we allow emotive hyperbole to replace objective reasoning. You should really spend some time reading the government's historical budget tables. A wealth of information that will allow you to power through your Google and CNN addiction you need to help you feel like the smartest guy in the room.
The CIA involvement in the breaking of working class economic opportunity is secondary to their masters whom are the academic and moneyed elites that demanded that we export working class economic opportunity to other countries (while importing other country's poverty for the cheap labor) in the expectation that they would be made less envious and less prone to global violence, while also expanding the global consumer base to fill the pockets of the corporatists.
Sure the American war industrial complex is part of that... but only a part of that. Wall Street in general is the bigger part of that. So are the ivory tower ivy-league graduates from the wealthy families that go into to government and policy jobs.
They fucked it all up. That is the message in this piece by Chris.
Now, what do they do about it?... they become modern Democrats connected with the WEF globalist Great Reset and Agenda 2030 which requires that US industrial might be eradicated and the independent worker and small business be wiped out to be replaced with a global corporatocracy and a completely UBI-dependent population... and the become committed to the final coup-de-grace dispatching those racist neofascist white working-class people.
Your "capitalist" system never was "yours" Frank unless you were born into the .1% . The same ones that are War Profiteers. The US permeant war economy devours your money and children both physically and mentally. I don't know where you get your statistics but military spending has gone through the roof since WW2. The MIC "gun belt" that snakes through America, state after state has created "arms" junkies. Weening the economy and the jobs they create has become political suicide. Clinging to these jobs in desperation that create death and destruction is folly. As Eisenhower said how many schools, hospitals, bridges and roads could be built instead of the expense of just one aircraft carrier?
Come on Frank...who runs the country ? Some say Big Pharma. The Military Industrial Complex does. The CIA was, and is, a part of the MIC. They do the covert dirty work at home and abroad. So when JFK threatened to break apart the CIA, he was threatening the true powerbase. So they eliminated him... and his brother. The Pentagon cannot account for at least 21 Trillion Dollars, and no problem. Do you count the 21 trillion in your factoring about defense spending and GDP ? I bet not. The moves the MIC have made over time has hollowed out economic opportunity... by design. Do you think the FED operates independently of the MIC ? Fat chance. Who ordered the Covid vaxxes ? The DOD. They were termed bio-medical countermeasures. All weapons ordered by the military (AKA: The Military Industrial Complex) are called 'countermeasures'.
If the US population is 331.9 million in 2021, the median income in 2021 is USD 97,962, then to pay for the 2023 Defence department appropriation with that money would take 30.8% of the average person’s income. Nobody has ever invaded America, except initially as a refugee or involuntarily as a slave, which latter doesn’t count; and that’s maybe all of you but the decimated indigenous populations, yet you spend that proportion of your incomes on defence?
Is this because it’s very important to beat up communists to keep the world open for capitalism?
‘Just checking. ‘Glad to hear the proportion spent on defence has dropped, though. Losing just 30.8% of your disposable income must make life so much more manageable.
We are lucky the rich pay most taxes. The average person pays nowhere near that. 50% pay no federal income taxes.
Military spending is 2/3 of all government spending Craig. How about the rich war profiteers paying ALL the freight for war as they are the ones who profit from it. 800 foreign bases to protect American Interests, which is code for corporate interests. All of them are tax and war dodgers, that send the poor and working class, mostly from flyover country of the Midwest and South. The 50% of the US average persons has less wealth than the top 5 robber barons and the .1% who have most of the other 50% could pay for war without lowering their lifestyle in the least.
Jim, That’s a good stat if it were true. The problem with leftists, is they spread falsehoods, which if true, would be earth shattering. The feds paid 877 billion in 2022 on military out of a budget of 6.4 trillion. About 14 percent. You do this to manipulate emotions. The problem is that your fun facts and others are almost never true.
Watch Bernie Sanders speech about the military industrial complex from last week. The problem with the right is too lengthy to print!
Perhaps 50% plus Trump. that is.
Everyone is subject to the same rules. The rich don't have some secret breaks. Whatever you imagine, the rich continue to pay almost all of our taxes. If you keep telling them they "don't pay their fair share, it doesn't help. You should be praising them for paying your taxes if you are in the 50% who pay none.
Really? Craig, do you still believe that we live in a society with equal rules for everybody? Perhaps only in paper. I pay more federal taxes than poor Trump. And for the rest of the rich people, that you praise so much, in percentage of my income I pay much more than them whose share in our scarce resources is bigger. And let us not forget the enforcement of the law. The average man that would have committed the financial and sex crimes of Trump would have been sitting in a jail long ago. Good for you that you live in such fantasies but denial is what is leading our collapse. My opinion, of course.
The Panama papers prove different. Ever heard of Swiss bank accounts or offshore accounts. How about when the corporations brought the billions of profits sitting in tax havens like Ireland only after retro active tax cuts were passed by Trump and the Republican congress. After all the profits had been calculated and tax requirements, only to renege and blackmail the government. Greed is Good?
Correction, nobody has ever invaded America successfully; I acknowledge that it has been attacked by Japan and by Jihadis, albeit both parties might claim this was a form of resistance to American economic and cultural hegemony, and argue provocation. So some residual level of preparedness for invasion is bound to be retained.
If you're of a certain age, you watched the betrayal of working people happen in real time, and if you're a working person, you know at some level that no political party has your interests in mind. Wealth became more prized than work. It started with Jimmy Carter, but reached its apogee under Bill Clinton's reign. I empathize with the feeling of betrayal, the anger, but feel it's directed at the wrong targets. It's not women, gays, drag queens, Blacks, Mexicans, immigrants -- it's bankers and hedge fund honchos and tech bros and Republicans and Democrats in Congress; it's a media that couldn't care less about working people; and it's a capitalist system that preys on people.
Nixon, Reagan, Dubya and Trump had a hand in too! Republicans and Democrat Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. Truman. Eisenhower and JFK have some "splaining" too!
The Dem apologist line is to blame the Reagan years. People now in their 50s only vaguely remember those years and for sure nothing prior. So it sounds plausible the R rightward turn meant the Ds reluctantly had to respond. Truth is the "centrists" (neolib advocates of econopathy) were staging an unfriendly take-over of the D party by the late '70s. They got rid of the New Deal and abandoned labor. And the D move rightward helped enable the outright fascism of the Rs. Since the current admin Ds have now allied with the neocons (State Dept.) I wonder if that wasn't the goal all along.
Not to mention Clinton, Biden and Obama.
My heart hurts reading about the people left over there. Truly they were left when the plants closed, when no one cared, when nothing remains to help them survive. This decay is spread across our nation and little is being done, the need is enormous. What rankles me is that we send billions to Ukraine, to Israel we spread weapons of mass destruction anywhere we can sell them. The seeds of disaster have taken root in our land. Meanwhile corporate CEOs etc. Politicians, big investors care only to satisfy their greed for power and wealth. We cannot expect to grow healthy citizens who are respectful of each other in an atmosphere like this. What the hell kind of world awaits my 2 year old great grandchild.
Fighting the biggest most prolonged and professionally run propaganda machine humankind has ever seen will take a serious serious effort to overcome. Not sure how any popular social uprising can surmount let alone defeat this single biggest mind fuck any population has ever endured. 70 years of diligent and subtle propaganda that has so utterly divided and conquered its own populace is a sight to behold from outside the bubble. The task so enormous and the parties effected so disparate it will be a miracle to achieve.
Vast 'Negative Externality Cost' Looting and deadly inequality caused by the 973 ruling billionaire bastards has finally killed America and our only fragile little world --- as Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his:
REQUIEM
The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
“Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do.”
The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
Vonnegut, Kurt. A Man Without a Country (Kindle Locations 931-936). Seven Stories Press. Kindle Edition.
I think this is the best thing I’ve ever read from this important writer.
Yesterday I was telling a liberal friend that if my car broke down I’d rather it happened in a broke down working class village than anywhere in Beverly Hills or Aspen.
It’s time to go back to our roots and understand that we need each other if we’re ever going to get close to where we want to be.
By the way, was the dog a Toi Poodle?
(Une petite blague).
My water pump failed in a small rural Montana town - the only garage in town - no others for 100 miles - charged me almost $900 to fix it. How do you like them apples?
Water pumps driven by timing belts is a big job at least 4-5 hours plus belt pulleys, pump and coolant. The price of apples was in the design from the auto makers. Who also chisel the time allowed for the flat rate wage of the mechanic.
Quelle drole!
Beautifully written!
We're the Victims, of the very sad state of affairs in which we normalize this kind of society.
Chris: This is a heart-warming essay celebrating a kind of survival against the odds and in the midst of ongoing tribulations of what one might call "ordinary" extraordinary people - the latter being the truth of us all in our unique individual stories. One of the things I noticed overall was the connection to flags and wartime experiences and the need to believe in one's country - no matter how that country seems to treat its citizens. There were three other things which stood out. The service in WWII in Guadalcanal (referenced in the musical "South Pacific"). When I lived in western Japan I taught three generations of one family - the accountant grand-mother's father was Admiral TANAKA Raizō whose ship was in that same zone. Post-war he spent much of his time caring for his men who had survived - and in the neighbourhood to where I lived a memorial cemetery to local graduates of the naval Academy just to the east of Hiroshima-city on Etajima who had died in the Pacific - on the standing stones with their names I read over and over 「グアダルカナル」Guadalcanal. Then you referenced Agent Orange. Two months back I was in Viet Nam and I visited two Art Centres where many of the artists at work creating beautiful pieces were victims to 2nd generation of Agent Orange DNA physical deformities. Dropped all over the north during what they call "The American War"! And the other was the reference - oblique though it was - in a sense - to the sole mariner disappearing between the Cook Islands and the western South Pacific island continent - my home - Australia. Thank you for the celebration of those otherwise ignored in the grander national narratives. One other thing - I am now well into Judith L Herman's Trauma and Recovery - following your interview of her recently. I mentioned it to Dean YATES - his own book riding high in the national Top 20 titles at present - published just a few weeks back. "Line in the Sand" - about his recovery from PTSD and/or Moral Injury - out of his Reuters journalism - at the Bali Bombing, at the Boxing Day tsunami on Sumatra - and in Baghdad as Bureau chief when the Apache gunship killed some of his staff - the "Collateral Damage" video of which Chelsea Manning passed on to WikiLeaks - and so the unedifying pursuit of Julian Assange still in progress. His reply: "Trauma and Recovery is one of the best books on trauma I've ever read. I've found it so helpful on my journey. Judith Herman's latest book Trauma and Repair (2023) is also fascinating." Thanks again, Chris.
As usual well said. The stories of every town I have been in. Boating through western Canada right now. Stories, outcomes, tragedies the same.