Mourning in America: Working People a Necessary Evil

It’s beginning to dawn on Americans that according to the Republican world-view, ordinary working Americans are a necessary evil, like exercise and broccoli.  They are unpleasant but obligatory.  Billionaires need average lower and middle class working people for two reasons, to: 1. buy stuff, and 2. do work they can’t have machines perform or outsource.  If they had their way, they would live within their walled enclaves, flying from their retreats in the mountains, to their private island home in the Bahamas, or to their chalet in Switzerland or on the French Riviera, where they could hob-nob with other millionaires and billionaires and never be forced to come into direct contact with people who actually do work with their hands. 

The only exceptions would be their private physicians on retainer, cooks, house keeping staff, drivers and pilots for their Lear Jets, and nannies.  Needless to stay, these employees would be required to wash regularly, avert their gaze in their employers’ presence, and keep their distance. 

Here comes the rub.  Some of the brighter billionaires are starting to figure out there aren’t enough people to buy their garbage or worthless “services.”  Ordinary people from Atlanta and Minneapolis, to Athens and Lisbon, can’t afford to continue buying their stuff.  Their corporations are desperately trying to convince us we need another smart phone, Flat Screen television or Ram Pickup Truck.  But not enough people can afford them.  That is actually the main reason the world economy is on the brink.  The economic crisis has little directly to do with deficits. The deficits have a cause, and that is that countries can no longer afford the most basic services expected of any civilized society.  Advanced democracies are gradually becoming failed states.   The main problem is lack of reasonable employment, wages and benefits for 90+% of the people. While the rich have gotten staggeringly richer, the average citizen has had no wage increases for nearly 20 years. 

Without sources of reasonable income, ordinary people have insufficient money to survive, and if they have little money they can’t buy stuff, and if we can’t buy stuff the billionaires can’t keep getting richer and richer.   Wow, that’s a real problem… for rich people!  And for governments, if ordinary people aren’t earning enough money they pay less and less in taxes, which provides decreasing money to support the most basic governmental services. Ergo, we’re all on our way down the crapper except the 1%... at least for now.

So maybe the billionaires’ next step will be to merge their largest corporations with the US government so they can begin directly collecting taxes from the rest of America instead of depending exclusively on income from purchased goods and services. That isn’t as far fetched as it may sound if they control the Supreme Court, the Congress and a Republican is elected president.  Oh, it wouldn’t happen over night, but over four years, that’s another matter.  That way Billionaires can still get away without paying living wages or providing benefits to workers, and continue having machines do nearly everything or shipping jobs to China, India, Pakistan and eventually to the Congo, Liberia and Zimbawe.   The goal, in due course, is to level the standard of living across the globe so in all countries workers wages and government services are roughly equal, very, very low and barer than bare bones services.  

So we can envision a Koch Department of Energy, and an ATT Federal Communication Commission, and a Blackwater National Security Agency.   Remember in “Brave New World” the citizens were required to recite, “Our Ford who art in heaven…” as they prayed to the T, as in Model T Ford.  Today, of course, the religious symbol would be a K.