Tag: class warfare

You have to work so hard to be poor in America

W.J. Astore

Before my father became a firefighter, he was for many years a factory worker. He knew hard work, and he once told me that the harder he’d worked in his life, the more physical the labor, the less pay he’d received. He also reminded me near the end of his life that the rich had neither sympathy nor use for the poor.

Perhaps you’ve already seen the above video in which a working-class American, a painter who has his own small business, breaks down as he laments his inability to provide for his wife and daughter in these increasingly bleak economic times. His naked vulnerability, and his call for real change, will break your heart.

Have a heart if you’ve got a heart, my Polish mother-in-law would say, and she too knew the reality of factory work. Speaking of heart, she had a large and generous one. Why is it that those who have the least money while slogging the hardest for it often are the most generous?

Truly, you have to work so hard to be poor in America. Being poor comes at an enormous price in so many ways. Yet Americans are encouraged by our “betters” to focus on “lifestyles of the rich and famous” while disparaging and looking down on the working poor.

This country is seriously fucked, to use a technical term, and nothing is going to change until we listen to those who are calling for us to come together and make fundamental changes to a thoroughly corrupt and corrupting system of government/business that worships nothing but money as a measure of goodness and greatness.

1972 and 2022, or Long Live the Fighters

W.J. Astore

Fifty years ago, a remarkable thing happened in America. A pro-peace candidate, George McGovern, won the nomination for one of America’s two major political parties. Of course, McGovern went on to lose big time to Richard Nixon in the fall, but his rise within the Democratic Party, much of it driven by grassroots activism, still inspires hope.

McGovern was right in 1972 in his justly famous “Come home, America” speech after he gained the nomination. It’s time to end overseas wars and military adventurism and heal our divisions here at home. The big problem, of course, is that so many powerful elements within the U.S. thrive best when the masses are kept busy fighting each other.

A friend posted this image on Facebook, which sums up much of America’s predicament today:

Progress within the terrarium won’t happen as long as we keep fighting each other

To borrow from my father once again, in America the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. And the rich have neither sympathy nor use for the poor. Unless by “use” you mean soldiers for empire, cleaners for mansions, and so on.

What is to be done? People ask me this a lot, expecting me to have a magical solution. I say fight the best you can, using your skills and the tools at your disposal. But make sure you’re fighting the right people and forces. Don’t fight your neighbors within the terrarium. Fight the powerful who are preventing change by keeping us divided, distracted, and downtrodden.

“Long live the fighters!” as they cried in “Dune.”

Too Far Left?

buffett

W.J. Astore

Boris Johnson’s victory in Britain is generating predictable headlines in the USA.  Scanning the New York Times this morning, I saw a headline suggesting the Democratic Party is drifting too far to the left to win in 2020.  What arrant nonsense.

In the mainstream media, political issues in America are almost exclusively presented in terms of left and right.  Again, this is nonsense, because America has no leftist party.  We have two rightist ones: the Republicans and the moderate Republicans, otherwise known as Democrats.

In America, the true political divide isn’t about left-right; it’s about top-down, as in the richest Americans and corporations against the rest of America.  When Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos are worth as much as the bottom 50% of Americans (that’s 160 million people), do you think top-down disparities in wealth and power might just be a bit more important than left–right issues?

At least Warren Buffett is honest about this.  “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”  The only candidate who’s willing to tackle this issue consistently, Bernie Sanders, is the one who’s either ignored or vilified as extreme by the mainstream media.

Sanders is right.  America needs a political revolution, one in which workers’ concerns would finally take first rather than last place.  And that has nothing to do with being a leftist or rightist.