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Bert Wolfe

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So many in the rarified atmosphere of the plutocracy of the 1 percent have no empathy with the struggles and suffering of their employees whatsoever; in fact are hoping to crush the American middle class under their iron heel.

Sadly, the American plutocracy of the 1 percent, devoid of any patriotism for America or any real love for their fellow human beings, with an unslakable thirst for even more wealth and hunger for the very real power that great wealth brings with it, want to destroy the incomes, wealth, and political power that average working Americans gained during the “Golden Age of the American Middle Class: 1945 to 1973.”

The predatory, kleptocratic plutocracy of the 1 percent has a well thought out plan to further enrich itself and firmly entrench itself in power, all at the direct expense of the average working people of America and by undermining American representative democracy. This reactionary plan has been in slow, steady execution since the 1970s. Instead of attacking the American middle class and representative democracy in a lightening frontal assault, these reactionaries have been chipping away at middle class, "small-d" democratic America in small, but steady steps for over 40 years. Their plan is already far along and bearing fruit for them. Their intention is nothing less than to replace prosperous, middle class America with a Third World style oligarchy, America as it fits in the plutocratic envisioned "New World Order.”

As the "New World Order" quietly, insidiously spreads itself across the American economy, good paying, career track jobs with good benefits are becoming increasingly hard to find, and the wages and salaries of the bottom 50 percent of workers are, according to economist Thomas Piketty and associates, "collapsing.” Twenty-seven year olds are more likely to earn less than $15,000 a year.

The emerging "New World Order" will become a supranational, multinational corporation dominated, worldwide fascist order, a worldwide "neofeudalism,” in which the plutocrats and the corporate executives constitute the very tiny new feudal "aristocracy,” modern day feudal lords. The large, prosperous and powerful middle class America that developed after WWII will evaporate and disappear, being replaced with a small, greedy, servile “retainer class" of people who provide goods and services to the new aristocracy and to each other. And below that will be a huge class of unemployed, underemployed, and sporadically employed people, a huge "reserve army of impoverished labor,” modern day feudal serfs, employed and let go as the aristocracy and retainer class need workers.

We can already see it taking shape. Decent, good paying, full time jobs with good benefits are becoming increasingly rare, as a new economy of poorly paid part time jobs, and temporary "gigs" is taking the place of the old American middle class world of remunerative full time employment. People are desperately clamoring to get themselves, and especially their children, into the elite universities, graduate schools, professions, and firms that will populate the new retainer class.

In effect, there is a perverse game of "musical chairs" being played at the moment, in which currently middle class people march around the shrinking number of slots, "chairs,” in the emerging retainer class, and battle each other to claim a seat when the music stops. All are desperate to avoid slipping down into the emerging neofeudal "serfdom.”

Unfortunately, this is a "game" that most currently middle class people will lose.

 In the early 1970s, the far right wing backlash and counterrevolution to the reforms of the New Deal, the post-WWII era, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Great Society began. It started with the infamous Powell Memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce of 1971 that served as the blueprint of how the American oligarchy could undermine the power and wealth that the American middle class had gained for itself and restore the primacy the oligarchy had prior to the Great Depression of the 1930s. The American oligarchy has followed the instructions of the Powell Memorandum closely for nearly 50 years now, has regained the power, influence, and wealth it had lost, and shifted the political discourse and struggle in America dramatically to the right.

In 1973, began the Great Uncoupling of increases in American wages and salaries from increases in corporate productivity and profitability. Except for measly, grudging pay increases to cover inflation, the average working people of America ceased to share in the tremendous wealth that their labor created for the bosses and the shareholders. Forty-seven years is a LONG time to go without a REAL pay increase, and it explains why so many people in America are flat broke, struggling, living precariously from paycheck to paycheck, and are in debt up to their eyeballs. It also explains much of the social discontent and the “deaths of despair” in America in the years since.

Much of this reactionary counterrevolution occurred quietly and secretly, through profound, but stealthy economic moves that occurred in corporate executive suites and boardrooms, and in right wing scholarly studies and propaganda coming out of the work of a small, but dedicated cadre of right wing academics, and most effectively and tellingly, in the huge sums of money that the American oligarchy used to first undermine moderate center-right conservative politicians in the Republican Party, then to buy off business oriented politicians in the Democratic Party and push the “party of the people” hard to the right. Today there is no real, effective leftist political party in America, other than the small, vocal, but outnumbered and largely neutralized “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party.

Sad to say, but most average working people in America have been kept in the dark about what was happening, like frogs in a pot of water that was being heated slowly, but surely, until it was too late to respond effectively. Also, caught up in the day-to-day struggle to make a living, which became increasingly more difficult as the years went by, the average working people of America were simply too distracted and exhausted to pay much attention to politics and its effects on their socioeconomic standing.

Today the American oligarchy has pretty much succeeded in defanging and neutralizing the American political process as any sort of realistic threat to their power and wealth. The Democrats salute the oligarchs and say, “Yes,” and the Republicans salute the oligarchs and say, “Yes, Sir!” Completely forgotten in the elected bourgeois politicians willingness to do the oligarchs bidding is any REAL concern for the well-being of the average working people of America.

Any REAL reform here in America will only occur when millions of Americans take to the streets participating in mass demonstrations and general strikes.