Maria Gilmore wrote:
"May I try?
"Wages for the bottom 80% of the pop have been ever more increasingly, easily suppressed in the US for close to 40 years now. This is because there has been a both a huge decrease in well-paying jobs that are available to people with high school educations *and* a huge increase of people in the job market, largely because women have entered the paid workforce in droves.
"The first phenomenon---tremendous loss of good-paying stable jobs that the
great majority of people were seen as qualified to get---was caused *firstly* by the sweeping introduction by capitalists of all kinds of workforce automation and technology, especially the computer, starting in the 70s. When a single person at a computer workstation could do the work of 3, then 10, then more...of course, under a capitalist regime, those jobs simply went away. Plus millions of formerly well-paying factory jobs have been throughly automated out of existence for decades now, never mind outsourcing. These technologies were put to this use by a capitalist class aggressively in search of only one thing, greater profits. The success of automation in general then made the rest of the continuing aggression against the working class possible, as the capitalists realized they had most of us on the run.
"So, you have an economy in which millions of *decently paid jobs* have simply gone away for the vast majority of citizens. Most people are not considered to be qualified to hold a good paying job. You need a degree for that, or a very special skillset. There's a labor surplus for good paying jobs now. That's going to depress wages; but on top of that, add the response of the working class (and middle class, trying to stay middle class) to this situation: send more people in the household out to make money, to try to maintain the household standard of living. Mainly that means women entering the paid workforce in numbers never seen before. Women chose between traditional domesticity lived as renters counting every penny and paid employment that made it (hopefully) possible to raise a family in one's own home and maybe have some disposable income too. But of course: more workers on the job market = more labor glut = wages even more stagnant. More of everything going the capitalists' way, because they are holding wages flat but their profits are growing, and they are keeping what they used to share more with their workers.
"So you have more and more people competing for anemic paychecks. Wages are not keeping up with the cost of living. Even with two breadwinners, most households are not getting anywhere, and as time passes they begin to actually lose ground. Now what? Am I wrong in understanding that at this point, all that money the capitalists had coming out of their ears and in the banks was utilized to create the personal household credit boom--the capitalists started selling their enormous excess profits back to the workers in the form of credit cards and loans; without such credit, most workers could never have continued to maintain their standard of living and levels of consumption. The interest payments to capital from this deal meant even more money gushing into the capitalists' coffers, which fed the explosive growth of the financial sector, which was entrusted with all this loot and became ever more powerful and skillful at devising all kinds of ways to continue the con, play the markets, and take more and more control over commerce in general so that they now get a huge piece of any and all action.
"The big question I always come back to: why was it so easy to take advantage of the great majority of the populace? Why did the average American not put two and two together? Why, when told "Sorry, but to qualify for a decent-paying job you need to get a very expensive piece of paper first", did we just hang our heads and shuffle away? What is it about Americans that made it so simple to fleece them, to cow them?
"Or do I have it all wrong?"
The simple answer to this all is US people have been stupefied beyond all imagination.
Take a simple example:
'Reelected as President in 1916 as "the man who kept us out of war", Woodrow Wilson got the support of Congress on the April 2, 1917 for declaration of war against Germany. His rhetoric was: "... we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest to our hearts-for democracy... for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free." ' "for democracy" hands were joined with the British bosses that had George V as the King, and where women had been denied the voting-right up to the time. "for democracy" hands would have been joined with the tsar himself had he not been overthrown before the time. "for democracy" all aid was later to be meant for the tsarist white-guards... And indeed the war was fought "for democracy"- because Mussolini, Hitler, General Primo de Rivera, King Alexander of Yugoslavia, and a wide range of other people were indeed the heroes "for democracy" that came to power. Indeed it is "for democracy" that the Sultans and dictators, etc., have been receiving the special favors of US bosses right up to the present. ' "rights and liberties of small nations!", "peace and safety to all nations!", "world itself at last free!"-if Wilson was not totally mad or a first class rogue, he certainly served to be a pure manifestation of a donkey of fantasy. Or else you can as well call him the lord of nonsense. 'As for the rest, the terms of the Treaty of Versailles in all its monstrous savagery show the full face of the capitalist world and the rotten heap of lies that their world's statesmen pass as truth. The treaty speaks everything clearly. 'As for the German aims of the war, the Brest Litovsk Treaty clarifies them.' Take another example: 'The Atlantic Charter (1941) of Roosevelt and Churchill proclaimed among other things need for the projects for a peace settlement which would "afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want." ' "All the men is all the lands!" "Live out their lives" "in freedom from fear and want!" 'What can one say in this regard?'.
And these very people, or rotten scoundrels, cowards, imbeciles and liars, and their henchmen and slaves, tell you: Marxism has failed! Communism has been rejected! Lenin was a wicked dictator! And so forth. If so, ask them: Who has won? What has won? Are the winners: March of humanity towards extinction; engendered water-scarcity and the prospect of wars between various countries and within each country for water; water and air pollution; famines; wars; pestilence; deaths by starvation as in Somalia and other places; cannibalism; rule and hegemony of scoundrels; headlessness; worldwide frustration; forlornness of everybody; extinction of love; extinction of friendship; extinction of integrity; extinction of character; disconcern to everything; humanity's falling down to the status of worst of all brutes; and so forth? If Marxism has been defeated, and communism rejected; then these winners must be acknowledged and accepted. If the defeated and rejected are defeated and rejected forever, and adjudged worthy of defeat and rejection; then the winners must be accepted and appreciated, and they must be adjudged worthy of acceptance and appreciation. In other words, we are being told that that every person of the species we belong to is worthy of his or her death for want of a glass of water or for fresh air. Suffocation has won; fresh air has been defeated and rejected forever. The world is so wretched, tense, frustration-ridden, full of chaos and genocides... just for the pleasure of a million odd masters-