From time to time, someone under 30 will ask me, "When did this all begin, America's downward slide?" They say they've heard of a time when working people could raise a family and send the kids to college on just one parent's income (and that college in states like California and New York was almost free). That anyone who wanted a decent paying job could get one. That people only worked five days a week, eight hours a day, got the whole weekend off and had a paid vacation every summer. That many jobs were union jobs, from baggers at the grocery store to the guy painting your house, and this meant that no matter how "lowly" your job was you had guarantees of a pension, occasional raises, health insurance and someone to stick up for you if you were unfairly treated.Young people have heard of this mythical time -- but it was no myth, it was real. And when they ask, "When did this all end?", I say, "It ended on this day: August 5th, 1981."
Beginning on this date, 30 years ago, Big Business and the Right Wing decided to "go for it" -- to see if they could actually destroy the middle class so that they could become richer themselves.
And they've succeeded.
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Michael Moore is a big joke. He claims the middle class was being crushed during the Reagan era?? Has he forgotten when the great depression hit and almost all the working class men became homeless and lived in hooverville's. Herbert Hoover was the then republican elected president just like Reagan was in the 80s. That was almost 50 years ago when the big corporations shoved America to the wall. The bourgeoisie element of Overproduction was one of the biggest causes of the Great Depression and when the dark times hit America, they ran off in under-wears. This Michael Moore guy needs to get some facts straight. The corporations took full advantage of this economic pandemonium and build huge buildings like the empire state on low wages. Raegan was the least of the worries whereas the precedent events and leaders created a marsh pit for the future.
ReplyDeleteHe's not comparing with the 30s but with the 60s or even 70s. He does have in any case a very good point when he claims that a lot of modern problems began with Reagan. I have stated that in the past myself: Reagan invented the credit bubble and proclaimed that greed is good.
ReplyDeleteOddly enough, his "system" (pyramid scheme) managed to work for almost 30 years, what is more than most Ponzi schemes last.
"Raegan was the least of the worries whereas the precedent events and leaders created a marsh pit for the future".
I'm not sure I understand this. Not in vain the ultra-conservative neo-liberal attack starting in the 80s is known as Reaganism. Maybe Margaret Thatcher is more to blame than he is but the UK is not that influential anymore.
I know he is not comparing the 30s with the Reagan presidency but HE SHOULD BE. I shall quote, "Beginning on this date, 30 years ago, Big Business and the Right Wing decided to "go for it" -- to see if they could actually destroy the middle class so that they could become richer themselves." This claim is childish, fundamentally the destruction of middle class begin in the 30s. How did the middle class come to be in the first place? Vast industries who overproduced necessary and useless products for all consumers even the poor.
ReplyDelete"Young people have heard of this mythical time -- but it was no myth, it was real. And when they ask, "When did this all end?", I say, "It ended on this day: August 5th, 1981."
This is a lie, right before the great depression a family could survive with one member of the family working as a worker or a farm laborer. It is a fact that women and children were not made to work, exception of foreigners. The great depression coerced the other family members to work and support the family, hence the increase in feminine movement.
I understand that Reagan tripled the countries debt but the point I am making is not that Reagan was a good president but even policies before Reagan were demeaning to middle class Americans. So it never begin with Reagan's 80s, but with the great depression and honestly even before WWI.
Why did Reagan adopt such public debt policies? It wasn't he conceptualize those ideas out of the blue but due to the weak economic policies of the 1970s. HELLO, THE EFFIN NIXON ADMINISTRATION?? Remember Henry Kissinger? 70s better than the 80s? no freaking way.
What Moore describes does not belong to a "time of myths" of which almost no survivor is left (i.e. pre-WWII) but to a standard reality not just in the USA but in all the so-called "First World" of an illusory "Candyland" or Capitalist dream society.
ReplyDeleteThis was engineered (by Keynesian means) after WWII (and using this one as impulse) in order to prevent a rebirth of the socialist waves that shattered mainly Europe but also the USA in the first half of the 20th century. And also, relatedly, as means to contain Soviet influence inside NATO.
It is not until 1971 that there was serious crisis threatening this Candyland dream society (although the 1968 socio-political movement was also a threat, against which the OPEC may have been used, I speculate). Whatever the case, the transition from the disciplinary to the social worker system continued its pace through the 70s and the collapse of the South European fascisms was a clear sign of that as well.
Sure, there was Nixon but Nixon is more of a scarecrow to fill up Futurama episodes. He's more archetypally evil than meaningfully evil (though admittedly it were his ministers who engineered 9/11 but that's another story). In any case, he was removed for a reason: he may have been a bit before his time indeed.
But Reagan? Reagan is a whole new animal, he sponsored (rather than really invented Reaganomics (not every Hollywood lesser actor gets to name a whole economic subsystem), which basically means reducing or even suppressing altogether state intervention, specially redistribution towards the lower tiers of society, a pillar of the previous "miracle" system.
As he would not tax the rich, he forced the state into a growing borrowing spiral (in spite of aiming in theory to reduce government spending), increasing its formal dependency on the Big Capital.
Th surprising thing is that they (Reagan, Thatcher and such) could do that with minimal backslash. That was because the unions had been deactivated and because they created a credit bubble to make up for the vanishing welfare and sustain the demand. Incredibly enough, the bubble lasted almost three decades! Though admittedly it was mostly grown by Reagan's successors than himself, he was without doubt who sowed it first of all.
You think that there was a mainstream pseudo-middle-class (working class with homes and cars) before WWII. I think you are very wrong: even if there may have been something of that in the "crazy 20s" it was not at all what grew like mushrooms after WWII. Not at all.
Discussing at such long term would get us to debate Capitalism and the growth of locally privileged "lackey" working classes that Marx already described in Southern England and the Côte d'Azur and that he forecast would be much more common after China would be divided (what never happened as such after all but precisely because the USA wanted it all, and would have lost with any partition).
Surely, I don't know well the details, there was some growth of a "lackey" privileged working class in the USA as well beginning maybe in 1898, the year that the USA became a true imperialist power. But nothing like what happened after WWII, with all those suburbs spawning like mushrooms and such. Not at all.
And much of the same can be said about Europe.