Middle Classness

The middle class in the United States is on the decline.  Although this has been a long-term trend, recent years have acerbated the disparity between the upper and middle classes … while the lower classes seem to be doing OK … see the Growing Income Divide graph in the following story: Washington Post Story.  As can be seen in this graph, the lower classes are holding their own … most likely due to the recent dramatic growth in our welfare state ... while the middle classes are being eroded ... and the upper classes are on a roll.

Why is this middle-class shrinkage happening?  I believe that our reliance upon the Federal Reserve Bank to spur our (however anemic) national economic growth with artificially low interest rates is one reason.  This means that those plutocrats with plenty of assets can benefit from the difference between their low borrowing costs and what they can achieve with arbitrage in the various asset markets (stocks, bonds, communities, and currencies).  Whereas, our less sophisticated middle class, including many retirees, are stuck behind the eight-ball of low returns on their more modest assets.

Also the continued decline in the U.S. manufacturing sector is another drag on middle-class prosperity … exacerbated by increased government regulation and many unions hitting the glass ceilings on their wage inflations.  There also has been a dramatic swing to part-time labor in the service sector (due to that you-know-what law).

In closing, I cannot ignore the connection to the “Black Value System” that members of the Trinity United Church (whose membership included the Obama’s prior to 2008) signed as part of their church commitment.  One of the tenants of this pledge was “Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness” … see reference in: Liberal Progressive. Have President Obama’s policy implementations over the last five years somehow been swayed by his previous Trinity United Church signed pledge?  I wonder?

Afterthought: The middle class is one of the pillars of a capitalistic society.  Its current erosion here can do nothing but accelerate the United States's movement toward European-style stateism. Perhaps that is part of the strategy?

Free Markets Suck!

President Obama revealed a little more of himself than possibly his teleprompter writers intended on Tuesday when he spoke in Osawatomie, Kansas.  In essence he launched a backhanded attack on capitalism with "the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can" (see: Speech Text around the bottom of page one).  This rhetorical flourish is clearly meant to imply that capitalism is, in fact, a free license to steal ... and the baby is now floating down the gutter along with the dirty bathwater. 

Interestingly enough, the New York Times neglected to mention this key dogmatic pronouncement in its write-up of this event (see: NY Times's Take).  Actually The Barry has said quite similar things in the past ... in particular at the Cooper Union in early 2010 ...  which went mostly ignored, I think, because he was still on his honeymoon with the American people (see: The Daily Kos Story). Now, I and many others on the right believe that this statement overtly manifests the key core value that Obama brought into the White House ... which had been taught to him on his anarchist mother's knee and reenforced by his many radical friends -- that capitalism is the source of all the world's evil.

And, despite his Elvis-like-intonings to the contrary, he also seems to view as anathema that bulwark of capitalism, the middle class.  He, after all, had signed his name to the Black Value System when he joined Reverend Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church which overtly states that "middleclassness" is to be eschewed (see: Black Value System Text, item #8).  (One could say, with tongue-in-cheek that, being the President of the United States, he clearly does live up to that disavowal.)  In essence his subtle but steady tilting toward Marxism seems to be the "change' he "hoped" to achieve when elected ... and he is doing a pretty good job of it ... by keeping the U.S. economy on life support and then by stirring the class-warfare cauldron with a vigor that would have been envied even by Norman Thomas.