Will America's Besieged Middle Class Snap?

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/06/will-americas-besieged-middle-class.html

Will America's Besieged Middle Class Snap?
Yves Smith

I’ve been amazed at the complacency of Americans in the face of rape and pillage by the moneyed classes. Of course, I underestimate the impact of overwork and media brainwashing. If you are a member of the dwindling middle class, you are probably devoting all your energies to hanging on to your job and trying to be a decent partner and for those with families, parent. Any kind of sustained political action (unless you grew up with it in a serious way) is unlikely to rate as high as a tertiary concern. In our total information society, protesting has high odds of getting one’s mug in a video that could come back to haunt you. An arrest would show up in a background check. What a great way to keep the peasantry in line.

Civil disobedience went out of fashion with Thoreau, if not before then. Bourgeois sensibilities and taking to the barricades do not mix. Oh yes, we may admire Gandhi and Mandela, but they were oppressed and had little to lose in bucking the authoriites (well take that back, Mandela did give that great speech at his trial about being willing to die). In the US, with the exception of the 1960s, protests have been mainly working class affairs We have our mortgages and our social standing to consider.

But times may be a changin’. Angry investors tortured a savings-destoying money manager in Germany. Who knows what would have become of Bernie Madoff if his victims had gotten near him. And in an interesting bit of synchronicity, Leo’s post tonight is about the nouveau pauvre.

If the green shooters are proven correct, the odds of upheaval are close to nil. However, if things get worse, the US may reach a tipping point. But Americans like gore only on the big screen, and we don’t have a tradition of general strikes a more civilized way of registering serious discontent.

Marshall Auerback, at the end of a very good piece “Major Social Upheaval Likely if Bank Bonanza Continues,” suggests another angle, that of payment revolt:

By contrast, the current bonanza for banks is neither economically efficient, nor politically sustainable.
What is driving the change in portfolio preference shifts is not only a misguided paradigm, but also an inability for the Obama administration to make a sensible, coherent case in what they are doing and why they are doing it. Their actions, in fact, seem to suggest that everything is ad hoc and that they are operating out of their depth, in effect continuing the same policies of the Bush/Paulson period, but on a much greater scale.

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It's that incurable optimism, see. They believe things will be all right up until the moment they are killed. They have no one to rouse them. Blacks in America had preachers and political types telling them to fight, and they did (destroying most of their own property and homes in the process). But white America doesn't have anybody saying that except the right wing and gun nuts, and they've only convinced a handful of people to become terrorists.

When Al Gore tells people to grab their firearms and converge on the Capitol, killing everything they see in their path, maybe that will change. I won't hold my breath, though.

"I’ve been amazed at the complacency of Americans in the face of rape and pillage by the moneyed classes. Of course, I underestimate the impact of overwork and media brainwashing."

I love how these self-proclaimed know-it-all bloggers think they're so much smarter than the general populace. People have been protesting, and will continue to protest. To people like Yves Smith, ironically, since they didn't see these protests on the news, they never happened.

I also can't stand these self-proclaimed "voice of the middle class" people who think that the rich have declared war on Americans and treat them like slaves. This is up there with New World Order conspiracies, but just replace the "New World Order" with "rich people."

"protesting has high odds of getting one’s mug in a video that could come back to haunt you"

lol. Ridiculous. People protest all of the time and never get arrested, and most people are not afraid to protest. Is this a blog about American society, or a piece of fan fiction ripping off "V For Vendetta?"

Labeling normal protest behavior as "Low Level Terrorism"?

Those protests during the Bush regime did wonders, didn't you think? Especially when Bush basically said "Yep, I see them- I don't care though. I'm in charge."

The war between rich and poor has existed as long as civilization. It has never ceased, even at those times when the poor forget that they are under siege because they are too damned busy staying alive and don't fight back.

I can attest to that.

and you sit by for over a decade pretending they didn't mean it and it just isn't so.

The quote from Warren Buffett in my sig line is from 1998 and things have only progressed from there. Oh, and it wasn't a one-off quote, he said it over and over all over the news, talking head shows, and interviews for months.

:kick: & R

our Playstations, Wiis, i-phones, big-screen tvs, gps systems, etc, we as a nation will be too zoned out to bother snapping.

... after they get thrown out of housing, and live on the street (where there's no power to use such toys), or if they have to sell those toys to pay the rent once they are unemployed and the unemployment benefits, etc. run out.

Precisely.

If religion is the opiate of the masses, electronic toys and thier amusements are the oxycontin.

... it's just a matter of time before I think the only thing that perhaps CAN wake them up to fight off their "masters" is if some in the middle class do "snap", and we see something more than some CEO getting cold-cocked in a health club, and that the consequences for some of these elites are a lot more and some of these people actually get killed.

It's too bad, because I'd like to think that the Democrats could see this coming down the road, and push congress and resist lobbyist pressure to do some major corrections, like public campaign financing to fix these problems. But the signs are that they aren't going to stop this from happening, the last resort that people will have to being slaves to this government, which will be violent at some point. I really wish they'd wake up and we could have a peaceful transition (ala what FDR did back in his time), but without leadership like FDR's that takes them in a different direction, I think the time is ticking to a very ugly future soon. And once that threshold is crossed, we may never get back the civilized society we had before again.

I hope I'm wrong, but I think that's coming unless something isn't done soon! Obama, are you listening to us?... It's time to step up and deliver on change for US, not to socialize a fascist state for the bankers' and elites' benefit.