There is a description of the Nazi gas chambers which I have never forgotten.
A man Vladek met in Auschwitz told him, “We pulled the bodies apart with hooks. Big piles, with the strongest on top, older ones and babies crushed below…"
Of all the gruesomeness of the Holocaust, this description stuck with me because it showed that people desperate to survive will turn on anyone, family, friends, infants. They desperately needed breathable air, of which the tiniest amount was available at the vent from which the deadly gas was delivered. So they fought each other for that last breath. And the strong won. Are the Darwinists proud?
Shall we say those dying Jews turned anti-Semite? Shall we say the male Jews became sexist? Or should we blame the people who built a giant apparatus to take away their lives by taking away their air?
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For the last forty years, the financial complex has been taking away the money of the 99%. They did it with usurious credit card interest and payday loans - all perfectly legal. They did it with the S&L crisis - the first bank bailout. They did it with the "liars' loans" mortgage fraud. They did it with unregulated derivative trading. They did it with the 2008 crash - the king of bank bailouts. They did it with High Frequency Trading (computerized front-running). They did it by manipulating LIBOR. They did it by conning state and municipal governments into buying disastrous bond packages and other overly-complex financial "instruments".
All of these robberies (coupled with massive outlays on war, police, and prisons) deprived the 99% of the means to live their lives - to pay the rent, to buy the groceries, to service the car, to send the kids to college, to pay the doctor, to have a decent retirement. It deprived their governments of the means to do their job — to repair roads, dams, sewers; to have adequate schools and well-paid teachers; to have alternatives to using the police as a profit center.
As people’s livelihoods disappeared, they saw, and were encouraged to see, that it's a dog-eat-dog, libertarian nightmare world out there; so fight for yourself and screw everybody else. As governments’ livelihoods disappeared, they engaged in a race-to-the-bottom to attract industry with right-to-work laws, corporate tax holidays, bribes to locate factories, and free construction of stadiums.
All the old differences that didn't matter when people's backs were not up against the wall resurfaced. Any excuse to shove someone else to the bottom of the pile because their just isn't enough money for all of us became the new norm. Of course, the white working class is still way better off than the urban ghetto underclass; but they don’t see it that way.
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IMHO, the rich understood exactly what the social consequences of increasing impoverishment would be; and they stirred them up. Their core constituency were the people who had lost the most, and therefore felt the impending catastrophe the hardest - namely, straight, white, working class men. (Call them "formerly entitled" for short.) An added bonus was that, until very recently, this constituency was a solid majority of American voters.
They were targeted with racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, anti-union, anti-intellectual, anti-government propaganda campaigns. Theocrats were bankrolled and given their own TV channels, while legitimate political interests were shut out by cable TV buccaneers like John Malone (who famously cut off cable service to a town until they passed a law he demanded).
All the hatred we deplore today may have always been there; but, until they started pumping the money out of the chamber, it had been in the background and healing. Inequality brought it to the front burner, and corporate media made it respectable.
Why do the formerly entitled hate immigrants? Because they think immigrants take their jobs. Why do the formerly entitled hate feminism? Because they think women have taken their jobs. Why do the formerly entitled hate gays? Because they terrified of people who are creative and justify all the other hated groups’ taking their jobs.
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Bottom line: Racism, sexism, homophobia - these are all symptoms. The massive economic inequality is the disease that drives all these symptoms.
Liberalism, progressivism — whatever you call the politics of loving your neighbor — depend on some degree of economic security, some degree of hope for the future. Absent that, the symptoms of poverty and desperation re-emerge and can easily lead to fascism or theocracy.
Please do not throw the baby of inequality out with the bathwater of the Sanders campaign.
