A Corporate Thanksgiving

As reported in the NYTimes corporate profits for the last fiscal quarter were the highest (before factoring in inflation) in U.S. history. While America's workers see their future crumble under the weight of joblessness and debt, the lords of Wall Street can hardly contain their glee. As the WSJ coyly describes it: the record bonuses being lavished on managers demonstrate Wall Street's "knack for finding a way to churn out profits and prop up pay levels despite uneasy markets, mounting regulation and mistrust by many Americans."

In the past when we spoke of two Americas the discussion centered on race and its intersection with poverty. No more. America's chickens or should I say turkeys have finally come home to roost. Having worked tirelessly since the end of post Civil War Reconstruction to keep black, white and brown labor at each others' throats our scions of Wall Street are callously setting about destroying what remains of the country's middle-class. We are evolving towards a system where the corporation replaces the old plantation: the haves get to govern as barons and the slaves are forever the have-nots.

Roasting the Middle Class Goose

The top 1 percent has been able to see their incomes rise almost twenty-fold over the past thirty years by playing each class of worker against the other, all with the encouragement of our own government. As a result we have the unconscionable spectacle of U.S. banks using taxpayer money to pay themselves massive bonuses while laying off American workers to hire temporary foreign replacements on the cheap.

"An investigation by the Associated Press revealed that major U.S. banks brought in foreign workers for high paying jobs while laying off American workers at the same time. The investigation revealed that a dozen banks requested visas for 21,800 foreign workers over a six-year span."--

(Now picture 21,800 mortgages sliced and diced and parceled out into Collateral Debt Obligations going belly-up. That's what our grifter class declares as smart money.)

As for those good blue collar jobs, thanks to his manipulated failure to make common cause with the black brown and red, the pale working stiff is getting the same shaft his "white trash' ancestors did when their wages were kept meager because of slavery.

In her excellent book "The New Jim Crow" Michelle Alexander explains how thanks to the policies of the government elite African Americans have been systematically kept apart and economically weak. She describes how the so-called 'War on Drugs' replaced the insidious control of race segregation. But the benefit of mass incarceration of the dark-skinned working poor goes even further towards enriching the investor class.

"The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners' work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself," says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being "an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps."

The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. "This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors."

As the writer sums up in El Diario-La Prensa: the rich have a lot to be thankful for. Thanks to prison labor, the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work designed for Third World labor. Now we know why Wall Street is so content to sell out the country and give us the bird.

The Left Didn't just Fail, It Was Slaughtered

In my previous post I alluded to the specter lurking in Chris Hedges' article, 'the "Phantom Left'. In his follow-up, 'A Recipe for Fascism' , he again disdains the 'liberal class' but while America's bourgeoisie surely deserve his scorn, his assertion that 'a disenfranchised and angry underclass is being encouraged to lash out at the bankrupt liberal institutions and the government that once protected them' is both faulty analysis and a distortion of history. The hopes of the underclass have never figured in our political thinking.

Thanks to racism and mass immigration the socialist movement that transfigured Europe and inspired Africa and Asia never took root in America. The influx of poor Eastern Europeans coupled with the Great Northern Migration of the recently freed slaves was considered a threat by the lily-white unions. So while it is true that groups like the Wobblies and the Congress of Industrial Workers managed to diffuse some of the fear by showing that united, women and ethnic minorities could extract concessions America's labor force remained largely segregated and hopelessly divided.

As an English visitor observed in the years before WWI: "menial work is increasingly felt to be beneath the dignity of the free white American. The intelligent, highly paid American is actually in the position of a ruling class. He is served and attended by negroes and alien immigrants very much as the ancient Athenian was served by a Thracian or an Asiatic."

It is this privileged status that the globalization that began after WWII has been steadily turning on its head.

The 'Problem is the Blacks'

On Monday, April 28, 1969, Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman noted in the White House diary: "President emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this, while not appearing to. Problem with overall welfare plan is that it forces poor Whites into same position as Blacks. Feels we have to get rid of the veil of hypocrisy and guilt and face reality."

The reality that the Nixon Government faced was how to manage white resentment as they saw their privileged status collapse in the face of Asian competition. Nixon had hoped to find a latter day Booker T Washington willing to temper black ambitions and accommodate negro subservience. Unfortunately for the Nixon Republicans and the capitalist power structure the 1960's press for equal rights made finding such a leader all but impossible. As Haldeman wrote:
"[the President] broods frequently over problems of how we communicate with the young and Blacks. It's really not possible except with Uncle Toms and we should work on them and forget militants."

The American system's solution to its middle-class problem developed on the tactics employed in the 1950's to discredit the Socialists and and destroy the Communist party. The War on America's emerging democracy otherwise known as Cointelpro was replaced by 'the War on Drugs'. By flooding black neighborhoods with illegal drugs and then issuing Draconian sentences for minor offenses the petty bourgeoisie was able to protect its endangered status and the politicians indebted to big business had fewer unhappy voters to try and content. That a Democratic president, William Jefferson Clinton, would merge the strands and expand the practice speaks volumes about 'liberal policies and their commitment to the poor.

When Clinton entered office, the entire prison population-local, state and federal-was just over a million. By the time he left it had doubled to over 2 million, the highest rate of incarceration and highest total of prisoners held in a democratic state in the history of the world.

60% of those federal inmates were in prison for nonviolent drug offenses. For the beleaguered white middle class it meant the boon of hundreds of new prisons, police weapons and corrections officers. A system grown so large that like our predatory banks it is now "Too Big to Fail". The largest public construction since the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s, the prison industrial complex helped expand the bubble once revered as the 'Great Clinton Economy'. It was a cynical strategy drawn from a reactionary tactic but brilliantly devised: 'Increase incarceration by nearly a million, add a couple of million workers to create and maintain a sprawling prison infrastructure, and voila! Lower unemployment and a healthier economy.'

Unfortunately for Barack Obama, the cost of the scam has now come due and middle class anger or not, he has no such option.