In the wake of the AIG bonus outrage, there’s a lot of crazy talk about how the direction of the country is going towards facism and socialism, some of it even coming from Europe!! But I think still unpublicized is the fact that over the past decade the uber-rich have, with the help of congress and the presidents in charge in this country as well as foreign governments, have been constructing this scheme designed to increase the gap between the upper class and the middle/working class. They did it by financially supporting those who argued for deregulation as well as supporting constructs that weakened the power of the working class (unions, healthcare, OSHA, etc).
For the most part they were succeeding, unfortunately they took it too far by trying to entice everyone else about the Excess Express to the point that people used their houses as credit cards until the house of cards collapsed. And now the post-mortem is ferreting out all these schemes (legal and illegal) and exposing the mindset of some of these people who would fly corporate jets from Dallas to Fort Worth if they could.
Well Dr. Zbigniew Brezinski (Carter’s National Security Advisor and an immigrant from Poland I believe) was on Morning Joe talking about the growing class warfare coming from the recognition of the gap between the wall street types who were lighting piles of cash on fire for fun, and the common people who may have seen their job of 10 or 20 years close down and their towns disappear. Of course this anger has been fanned by the media and congressmen (some who were at ground 0 for some of these schemes) and not surprisingly Jon Stewart!
YouTube – Brzezinski makes Jim Cramer nervous
Appearing on Morning Joe March 26, 2009, Zbigniew Brzezinski calls for the wealthy to give away much of their wealth in the name of “social solidarity.”
It’s an interesting video which speaks to a point that I’ve been wondering would ever come. I’ve actually been wondering about this since the 90’s. Would we ever reach a point where people would just say “fuck it” and try to take back the country. To a certain extent you have a group of demographics in the country who suffer from the same economic problems but have been kept apart by racial/cultural divides that have been exascerbated by poiliticians. I remember when Obama lost to Hillary in West Virginia in the primary, Virginia Democratic senator Jim Webb (and to an extent Jon Murtha in PA) mentioned that there are a lot of commonalities between poor black and poor white communities and that Obama is perhaps the perfect candidate to bridge that gap.
What I wonder is if this financial scandal and the much reported on excesses is a tipping point – where the villain isn’t painted as the welfare recipient in the NINJA loan-provided $500k house in the suburbs or the unproductive union worker bringing down GM and Chrysler, but instead the uber rich AIG worker who has the luxury of turning down 3/4 of a million dollars in salary.
If it is, are we, perhaps, seeing the beginning of a class shift, especially if Obama and his budget can succeed in changing how we look at healthcare. Are the financial regulations that are coming signaling a new era where making things will be more valued than insuring them? Will we see the benefits of having a more educated society where the high paying jobs that are coming don’t have to be filled by immigrants because of a lack of properly educated Americans?
The pessimistic side of me just can’t get past the fact that there will be enough people who are vested in the status quo that all of these measures will be watered down enough to present the image of change, but result in no meaningful change. Especially if these wild cries of socialism continue. I mean, have you listened to talk radio recently? You’d think Stalin were in Cuba with an Armada ready to invade.
Anyways, I hope at least healthcare and education are addressed. I don’t think we’re as good a nation when everyone is dumb and unhealthy. I think we’re paying for a generation of ignoring our problems as a result of greed and chasing excess. Keeping up with the Joneses has become keeping up with the Shahs and Sultans and Princes. And it’s pervaded our very core with home equity loans, wild refinancing, fuel-inefficient monster cars, and decades of chasing the next it-product whether Cabbage Patch dolls, Gucci and Versace accessories, X-boxes, iPhones or pets.com stocks. Or unattainable suburban housing. Or weekly (or even daily) nights out at the Cheesecake Factory or TGI Fridays.
We need badly to address what we’ve neglected for so long: our people, our infrastructure, our class architecture, our values. It’s either that or learn Chinese and prepare for the Beijing invasion. ????.
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