Killing the Middle Class; How the Corporatocracy Sets the Rules of the "Game" To Create Peons

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But the cons are not having this debate in an open and honest fashion. They are not asking We the People if we want to get rid of, for example, the Head Start program. They could ask, "Do we want to invest in our youth now or not?" We know that if we invest in educating the very young, fewer of them will become criminals. It will save us money over the long term. But if the majority of us say, "No, we would rather pay $50,000 to imprison them later than pay $300 to put them in Head Start now," then fine, it's a democracy.

But that's not the way the cons are doing it.

Instead of explaining why it would be better for Americans to give all their money to a corporate elite, they're giving huge tax cuts to the rich while pretending that the tax cuts benefit all Americans.

Instead of arguing that Americans should not expect the right to health care or security in their old age, they are prompting a government crisis by handing to the rich money they're borrowing from China, Japan, and Korea in the name of our grandkids. We are borrowing so much money from these countries that if they so much as blink, our currency could crash.

And that's just what the most ideological of the con elite want. They want an economic crisis because they figure that's the only way they can force a cut in spending on social programs.

In 2004 they thought they had starved the beast enough and sent Bush out on the campaign trail to advocate getting rid of Social Security-- privatizing it, putting it in the hands of Wall Street. But it didn't work. Turns out We the People apparently like Social Security. So the cons went back to starving the beast. Bush instead passed a new series of tax cuts, with more to follow.

The cons are trying to play the game so that the rich benefit while the rest of us lose out. They get tax cuts, and we get program cuts. That's not the "free" market. That's a market that's being created for the benefit of the rich at the expense of the middle class.

How the Game Works
The question Americans have faced since the first arguments between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in the 1780s was whether the game of business should be played with the primary goal of enriching the few, or-- while allowing the few to enrich themselves-- enhancing the quality of life of the many.

The cons suggest that if the rich win first, benefits will "trickle down" to the rest of us. Protecting workers, they say, will produce abnormalities and dislocations from the "free" market. For example, they suggest that when minimum wages are fixed by government, and labor can lawfully bargain to increase wages by increasing scarcity of labor through union actions, the result is an increase in prices, ultimately "hurting the working person."

But the economist they most often cite on this thinking, David Ricardo, disagreed that raising wages first increased prices. He noted, "On the contrary, a rise of wages, from the circumstance of the labourer being more liberally rewarded, or from a difficulty of procuring the necessaries on which wages are expended, does not, except in some instances, produce the effect of raising price, but has a great effect in lowering profits."

In other words, all the talk about keeping wages down to keep prices down is a smokescreen: business owners want to keep wages down to keep profits up.

And when wages go down, profits do indeed go up. American wages have been falling steadily since Reagan first reintroduced con economics in 1980, and American corporations are generally more profitable than they've been in decades. In part this is not only because wages are going down within the United States but also because U.S.-level wages are being replaced by India- and China-level wages through outsourcing and offshoring.

"But offshoring isn't the problem for American workers!" the cons shout. "It's the increase in productivity. American businesses need fewer workers because automation and hard work have made our workers more productive."

This is a tragic lie, and it's been bought hook, line, and sinker by most American politicians and even many economists.

Productivity is, very simply, the measure of how many products or services can be produced for how many dollars of labor expended. But offshoring distorts productivity figures in two ways.

First, foreign labor is cheaper, but it produces nearly identical amounts of product or service. The result is "increased productivity."

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Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program on the Air America Radio Network, live noon-3 PM ET. more...)

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