Common sense prevails

Heeding Obama's veto threat – and common sense – the Senate has voted to strip $1.75 billion from a $679.8 billion military spending bill that would have funded more F-22s – so-called fighter planes that cost $44,000 an hour, need 30 hours of maintenance for every hour in the air, and can't fly in the rain. Still, gung-ho right-wingers promptly proclaimed, "America is less safe now than it was an hour ago." Only $679.8 billion to go.

"If we can't get this right, what on earth can we get right?" Defense Secretary Robert Gates last week.

- Common Dreams

The Great Tax Con Job

.....

Thom Hartmann
July 21, 2009 - Smirking Chimp

.....

Republicans are using the T-word - taxes - to attack the Obama healthcare program. It's a strategy based in a lie.

A very small niche of America's uber-wealthy have pulled off what may well be the biggest con job in the history of our republic, and they did it in a startlingly brief 30 or so years. True, they spent over three billion dollars to make it happen, but the reward to them was in the hundreds of billions - and will continue to be.

As my friend and colleague Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks pointed out in a Daily Kos blog recently, billionaire Rupert Murdoch loses $50 million a year on the NY Post, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife loses $2 to $3 million a year on the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, billionaire Philip Anschutz loses around $5 million a year on The Weekly Standard, and billionaire Sun Myung Moon has lost $2 to $3 billion on The Washington Times.

Why are these guys willing to lose so much money funding "conservative" media? Why do they bulk-buy every right-wing book that comes out to throw it to the top of the NY Times Bestseller list and then give away the copies to "subscribers" to their websites and publications? Why do they fund to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year money-hole "think tanks" like Heritage and Cato?

The answer is pretty straightforward. They do it because it buys them respectability, and gets their con job out there. Even though William Kristol's publication is a money-losing joke (with only 85,000 subscribers!), his association with the Standard was enough to get him on TV talk shows whenever he wants, and a column with The New York Times. The Washington Times catapulted Tony Blankley to stardom.

"Fellowships" and other forms of indirect sponsorship of right-wing talk show hosts have made otherwise-marginal shows and their hosts ubiquitous, and such sponsorships of groups like Norquist's anti-tax "Americans for Tax Reform" regularly get people like him front-and-center in any debate on taxation in the United States.

All so they could run a tax con on the American people, thus keeping Moon and Murdoch and Scaife and Anschutz (and others) richer than you or I could ever even imagine.

All of this money was spent - invested, really, since it's been more than saved back in low income tax rates on millionaires and billionaires - to convince Americans that up is down and black is white when it comes to income taxes. Here's how it works:

Rich Person's Tax Effect

If a person earns so much money that he doesn't or can't spend it all each year, then when his taxes go down your income after taxes goes up. This is largely because there's little to no relationship between what he "needs to live on" and what he's "earning."

Somebody living on a million dollars a year but earning five million after taxes, can sock away four million in a Swiss bank. If his taxes go up enough to drop his after-tax income to only three million a year, he's still living on a million a year, and only socks away two million in the Swiss bank. His "disposable" income goes down when his taxes go up, and vice-versa. (Technically, the word is "discretionary" income for after-tax, after-living-expenses income, but "disposable" income has become so widely used as a phrase to describe discretionary income I'll use it here.)

The Rich Person's Tax Effect is the one that virtually all Americans understand - and, oddly, most working class people think applies to them, too (this is the truly amazing part of the con job referred to earlier).

But it doesn't.

Working Person's Tax Effect - version one

Most working people spend pretty much all of what they earn - their "disposable/discretionary" income is close to zero. Savings rates in the US among working people typically are small - one to five percent - and during the last few years of the W. Bush administration actually went negative. So the take-home pay that people have after taxes - regardless of what the taxes may be - is pretty much what they live on.

As economist David Ricardo pointed out in 1817 in the "On Wages" chapter of his book "On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation," take home pay is also generally "what a person will work for." Employers know this: Ricardo's "Iron Law of Wages" is rooted in the notion that there is a "market" for labor, driven in part by supply and demand. So if a worker is earning, for example, a gross salary of $75,000, his 2008 federal income tax would be about $15,000 ($802.50 on first $8,025 of income; $3,687.75 on income from $8,025 to $32,550; $10,612.50 on income from $32,550 to $75,000), leaving him a take-home pay of $60,000.

Both he and his employer know that he'll do the job he's doing for around $60,000 a year in take-home pay.

So what happens if his taxes go up, cutting his take-home pay to $55,000 a year (even though his gross is still $75,000)? Over time (typically one to three years) his wages will rise enough to compensate for the lost income.

Alan Greenspan used to be hysterical about this effect - he called it "wage inflation" - and The Wall Street Journal and other publications would often reference it, although the average working person has no idea that if his taxes go up, his wages will eventually go up. Similarly, when working-class people's taxes go down, their gross wages will, over time, go down so their inflation-adjusted take-home pay remains the same. We've seen both happen over the past eighty years, over and over again.

When I was in Denmark last year doing my radio show from the Danish Radio offices for a week and interviewing many of that nation's leading politicians, economists, energy experts, and newspaper publishers, one of my guests made a comment that dropped the scales from my own eyes.

We'd been discussing taxes on the air, what the Danes get for their average 52% tax rate (free college education, free health care, 4 weeks of vacation, being the world's "happiest" country according to research reported on CBS's "60 Minutes" TV show, etc.). I asked him why people didn't revolt at such high tax rates, and he smiled and just pointed out to me that the average Dane is very well paid with a minimum wage that equals about $18 US (depending on the exchange rate from day to day).

Off the air, he made the comment to me that was so enlightening. "You Americans are such suckers," he said, as I recall. "You think that the rules for taxes that apply to rich people also apply to working people. But they don't. When working peoples' taxes go up, their pay goes up. When their taxes go down, their pay goes down. It may take a year or two or three to all even out, but it always works this way - look at any country in Europe. And it's the opposite of how it works for rich people!"

Working Person's Tax Effect - Version Two

The other point about taxes - which Obama leveraged with his "no tax increases on people earning under $250,000 a year" pledge - has to do with the fact that our tax structure in the US is progressive.

Here's how it breaks out for a single person from the 2008 federal tax tables:

10% on income between $0 and $8,02515% on the income between $8,025 and $32,550;25% on the income between $32,550 and $78,850;28% on the income between $78,850 and $164,550;33% on the income between $164,550 and $357,700;35% on the income over $357,700.

Note that our $75,000/year worker has two full tax brackets above him, which, if they go up, will not affect him at all. (This is also true, of course, for the median-wage and average-wage American workers who earn in the low to mid-$40,000/year range.)

The top tax rate that a person pays is referred to as their "marginal tax rate" (in our worker's case 28%). So what happens if the top marginal tax rate on people making over $357,700 goes up from its current 35% to, for example, the Eisenhower-era 91%?

For over 120 million American workers who don't earn over $357,700/year, it won't mean a thing. But for the tiny handful of millionaires and billionaires who have promoted The Great Tax Con, it will bite hard. And that's why they spend millions to make average working people freak out about increases in the top tax rates.

Income taxes as the "Great Stabilizer"

Beyond fairness and holding back the Landed Gentry the Founders worried about (America had no billionaires in today's money until after the Civil War, with John D. Rockefeller being our first), there's an important reason to increase to top marginal tax rate, and to do so now.

Novelist Larry Beinhart was the first to bring this to my attention. He looked over the history of tax cuts and economic bubbles, and found a clear relationship between the two. High top marginal tax rates (generally well above 60%) on rich people actually stabilize the economy, prevent economic bubbles from forming, prevent economic crashes, and lead to steady and sustained economic growth (and steady and sustained wage growth for working people).

On the other hand, when top marginal rates drop below 50 percent, the opposite happens. As Beinhart noted in a November 17, 2008 post on the Huffington Post, the massive Republican tax cuts of the 1920s (from 73% to 25%) led directly to the Roaring '20s stock market bubble, temporary boom, and then the crash and Republican Great Depression of 1929.

Rates on the very rich went back up into the 70-90% range from the 1930s to the 1980s. As a result, the economy grew steadily; for the first time in the history of our nation we went 50 years without a crash or major bank failure; and working people's wages increased enough to produce the strongest middle class this nation has ever seen.

Then came Reaganomics.

Reagan cut top marginal rates on millionaires and billionaires from 74% down to 38% and there was an immediate surge in the markets - followed by the worst crash since the Great Depression and the failure of virtually the entire nation's savings and loan banking system.

Bush I cut taxes, and the nation fell into a severe recession while debt soared and wages for working people fell.

Things stabilized somewhat when Clinton slightly raised taxes on the very rich, but W. Bush dropped them again - including taking taxes on unearned income (interest and dividends - the "income" that people like W. born with a trust fund "earn" as they sit around the pool waiting for the dividend check to arrive in the mail) down to a top rate of 15%. (That's right - trust fund babies like Bush and Scaife pay a MAXIMUM 15% federal income tax on their dividend and interest income, thanks to the second Bush tax cut.) The result of this surge in easy money for the wealthy, combined with deregulation in the financial markets, was the "froth" Greenspan worried about and led us straight into the Second Republican Great Depression, ongoing today.

The math is really pretty simple. When the uber-rich are heavily taxed, economies prosper and wages for working people steadily rise. When taxes are cut for the rich, working people suffer and economies turn into casinos.

Roll Back The Reagan Tax Cuts

While there's much discussion about letting the Bush tax cuts expire, if we really want our country to recover its financial footing we must do something altogether different. We need to roll back the Reagan tax cuts that took the top marginal rate from above 70% down into the 30% range.

First, though, we have to help Americans realize that "no new taxes" is a mantra that is meaningful to the very rich, but largely irrelevant to average working people.

Only when the current generation re-learns the economic and tax lessons well known by the generation (now dying off) that came of age in the 30s through the 60s, will this become politically possible. Americans need to learn what Europeans know about taxes - they only matter to the rich.

Thus today the uber-rich are spending hundreds of millions to make sure words like "burden" are always associated with the word "tax," and to convince average working people that they should throw out of office any politicians who are willing to raise taxes on the rich.

We have a lot of education to do...and as long as the Right Wing Machine of the uber-rich continues to "lose" (e.g. "invest") millions of dollars a year in their ongoing disinformation campaign, it's going to require all of us reciting the mantra, "Roll back the Reagan tax cuts!"

.....

Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show carried on the Air America Radio network and Sirius. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent book, just released, is "Screwed: The Undeclared War on the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It." Other books include: "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection," "We The People," and "What Would Jefferson Do?"

Zen Moment of the Day

Cambridge police responding to a call about "two black males" breaking into a home ended up arresting the man who lives there – Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., probably the country's pre-eminent African-American scholar. The 58-year-old director of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute forced his own door open after finding it jammed; he was handcuffed and arrested on a disorderly conduct charge by police who said they were investigating a break-in.

"Why? Because I'm a black man in America?" Gates responded.

- Common Dreams

The Man in the Mirror

.....

Chris Hedges
July 13, 2009 - TruthDig.com

.....

In celebrity culture we destroy what we worship. The commercial exploitation of Michael Jackson's death was orchestrated by the corporate forces that rendered Jackson insane. Jackson, robbed of his childhood and surrounded by vultures that preyed on his fears and weaknesses, was so consumed by self-loathing he carved his African-American face into an ever changing Caucasian death mask and hid his apparent pedophilia behind a Peter Pan illusion of eternal childhood. He could not disentangle his public and his private self. He became a commodity, a product, one to be sold, used and manipulated. He was infected by the moral nihilism and personal disintegration that are at the core of our corporate culture. And his fantasies of eternal youth, delusions of majesty, and desperate, disfiguring quests for physical transformation were expressions of our own yearning. He was a reflection of us in the extreme.

His memorial service—a variety show with a coffin—had an estimated 31.1 million television viewers. The ceremony, which featured performances or tributes from Stevie Wonder, Brooke Shields and other celebrities, was carried live on 19 networks, including the major broadcast and cable news outlets. It was the final episode of the long-running Michael Jackson series. And it concluded with Jackson's daughter, Paris, being prodded to stand in front of a microphone to speak about her father. Janet Jackson, before the girl could get a few words out, told Paris to "speak up." As the child broke down, the adults around her adjusted the microphone so we could hear the sobs. The crowd clapped. It was a haunting echo of what destroyed her father.

The stories we like best are "real life" stories—early fame, wild success and then a long, bizarre and macabre emotional train wreck. O.J Simpson offered a tamer version of the same plot. So does Britney Spears. Jackson, by the end, was heavily in debt and had weathered a $22 million out-of-court settlement payment to Jordy Chandler, as well as seven counts of child sexual abuse and two counts of administering an intoxicating agent in order to commit a felony. We fed on his physical and psychological disintegration, especially since many Americans are struggling with their own descent into overwhelming debt, loss of status and personal disintegration.

The lurid drama of Jackson's personal life meshed perfectly with the ongoing dramas on television, in movies and in the news. News thrives on "real life" stories, especially those involving celebrities. News reports on television are mini-dramas complete with a star, a villain, a supporting cast, a good-looking host and a dramatic, if often unexpected, ending. The public greedily consumed "news" about Jackson, especially in his exile and decline, which often outdid most works of fiction. In "Fahrenheit 451," Ray Bradbury's novel about a future dystopia, people spend most of the day watching giant television screens that show endless scenes of police chases and criminal apprehensions. Life, Bradbury understood, once it was packaged, scripted, given a narrative and filmed, became the most compelling form of entertainment. And Jackson was a great show. He deserved a great finale.

Those who created Jackson's public persona and turned him into a piece of property, first as a child and finally as a corpse encased in a $15,000 gold-plated casket, are the agents, publicists, marketing people, promoters, script writers, television and movie producers, advertisers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards, recording executives, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers and television news personalities who create the vast stage of celebrity for profit. They are the puppet masters. No one achieves celebrity status, no cultural illusion is swallowed as reality, without these armies of cultural enablers and intermediaries. The producers at the Staples Center in Los Angeles made sure the 18,000 attendees and the television audience (even the BBC devoted three hours to the tribute) watched a funeral that was turned into another maudlin form of uplifting popular entertainment.

The memorial service for Jackson was a celebration of celebrity. There was the queasy sight of groups of children, including his own, singing over the coffin. Magic Johnson put in a plug for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Shields, fighting back tears, recalled how she and a 33-year-old Jackson—who always maintained that he was straight—broke into Elizabeth Taylor's room the night before her last wedding to "get the first peek of the [wedding] dress." Shields and Jackson, at Taylor's wedding, then joked that they were "the mother and father of the bride." "Yes, it may have seemed very odd to the outside," Shields said, "but we made it fun and we made it real." There were photo montages in which a shot of Jackson shaking hands with Nelson Mandela was immediately followed by one of him with Kermit the Frog. Fame reduces all of the famous to the same level. Fame is its own denominator. And every anecdote seemed to confirm that when you spend
your life as a celebrity you have no idea who you are.

We measure our lives by these celebrities. We seek to be like them. We emulate their look and behavior. We escape the messiness of real life through the fantasy of their stardom. We, too, long to attract admiring audiences for our grand, ongoing life movie. We try to see ourselves moving through our lives as a camera would see us, mindful of how we hold ourselves, how we dress, what we say. We invent movies that play inside our heads with us as stars. We wonder how an audience would react. Celebrity culture has taught us, almost unconsciously, to generate interior personal screenplays. We have learned ways of speaking and thinking that grossly disfigure the way we relate to the world and those around us. Neal Gabler, who has written wisely about this, argues that celebrity culture is not a convergence of consumer culture and religion so much as a hostile takeover of religion by consumer culture. 

Jackson desperately feared growing old. He believed he could control race and gender. He transformed himself through surgery and perhaps female hormones from a brown-skinned African-American male to a chalk-faced androgynous ghoul with no clear sexual identity. And while he pushed these boundaries to the extreme, he did only what many Americans do. There were 12 million cosmetic plastic surgery procedures performed last year in the United States. They were performed because, in America, most human beings, rich and poor, famous and obscure, have been conditioned to view themselves as marketable commodities. They are objects, like consumer products. They have no intrinsic value. They must look fabulous and live on fabulous sets. They must remain young. They must achieve notoriety and money, or the illusion of it, to be a success. And it does not matter how they get there.

The moral nihilism of our culture licenses a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal. Education, building community, honesty, transparency and sharing are qualities that will see you, in a gross perversion of democracy and morality, ridiculed and voted off any reality show. Fellow competitors for prize money and a chance for fleeting fame elect to "disappear" the unwanted. In the final credits of the reality show "America's Next Top Model," a picture of the woman expelled during the episode vanishes from the group portrait on the screen. Those cast aside become, at least to the television audience, nonpersons. Celebrities who can no longer generate publicity, good or bad, vanish. Life, these shows teach, is a brutal world of unadulterated competition and constant quest for notoriety and attention. And life is about the personal humiliation of those who oppose us. Those who win are the best. Those who lose
deserve to be erased. Those who fail, those who are ugly or poor, are belittled and mocked. Human beings are used, betrayed and discarded in a commodity culture, which is pretty much the story of Jackson's life, although he experienced the equivalent of celebrity resurrection. This has been very good for his music sales and perhaps for his father's new recording company, which Joe Jackson made sure to plug at public events after his son's death. Compassion, competence, intelligence and solidarity are useless assets when human beings are commodities. Those who do not achieve celebrity status, who do not win the prize money or make millions in Wall Street firms, deserve their fate.

The cult of self, which Jackson embodied, dominates our culture. This cult shares within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. Jackson, from his phony marriages to his questionable relationships with young boys, had all these qualities. This is also the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality.  It is the celebration of image over substance. 

We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. It is this perverted ethic that gave us Wall Street banks and investment houses that willfully trashed the nation's economy, stole money from tens of millions of small shareholders who had bought stocks to finance their retirement or the college expenses of their children. The heads of these corporations, like the winners on a reality television program who lied and manipulated others to succeed, walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation and bonuses. The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity.

The saturation coverage of Jackson's death is an example of our collective flight into illusion. The obsession with the trivia of his life conceals the despair, meaninglessness and emptiness of our own lives. It deflects the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, costly imperial wars, economic collapse and political corruption. The wild pursuit of status, wealth and fame has destroyed our souls, as it destroyed Jackson, and it has destroyed our economy.

The fame of celebrities masks the identities of those who possess true power—corporations and the oligarchic elite. And as we sink into an economic and political morass, as we barrel toward a crisis that will create more misery than the Great Depression, we are controlled, manipulated and distracted by the celluloid shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. The fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to drain us emotionally, confuse us about our identity, make us blame ourselves for our predicament, condition us to chase illusions of fame and happiness and keep us from fighting back. And in the end, that is all the Jackson coverage was really about, another tawdry and tasteless spectacle to divert a dying culture from the howling wolf at the gate.

.....

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, will be out in July.

America's White Underclass: When seeing ain't believing, somebody's blind

.....

Joe Bageant
July 19, 2009 - joebageant.com

.....

"White underclass" is a term I've used often in my writing, and most American readers seem to know what I mean. They've got eyes and live in the same nation I do. But in a sudden burst of journalistic responsibility, I decided that if I am going to throw around the word underclass, then I should offer some clearer, perhaps more scientific definition.

So I started writing this with a pile of published research papers before me. Now they are in the trash can by my side. Looking down on them, I can see the gobbledygook titles, the stuff of which government policy and political platforms are made. They run together in slurry of the language of our society's commissars: Concerning-Prevalence-Growth-and-Dynamics-Concentrated Urban Poverty Areas- block-level vs. tract-level segregation-800-tract-tables-urban abstracts-Defining-and-Measuring-the-Underclass-from-The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management-statistical-summary-of ...

What I find is that nobody in social science seems to agree on the term, or, being firmly placed in the true white middle class themselves, even agree if such a thing as a white underclass exists. You can't smell the rabble from the putting green. To others, some blacks for example, the term white underclass is an oxymoron, or maybe yet another new white social code word to be deciphered. I can't blame them for their wariness. You have to be an American to get even these code words. For instance, for all practical purposes and to most Americans, regardless of race, the term "middle class" means "white." Plain and simple. We all know that, even members of the "black middle class."

Middle class also has implications of people's occupations, usually white collar occupations, though it also includes some of the ever thinning ranks of blue-collar workers. But this comes down to describing human beings solely in terms of their jobs in the capitalist labor marketplace, and assumptions about income and whether one takes their daily shower before they go to work or after they come home. By that definition, anyone of working age who doesn't have a steady job of the right type, for whatever reason, is in some sort of "economic underclass." In other words, they are the people that middle class folks feel should damned well be working, if they are over age 18 and have a pulse. ("If I gotta do time in this meaningless workhouse of a nation, you do too!") This underclass includes any people of color seen on the street at midday during the week, single mothers, and paraplegics too, now that the middle class is paying taxes for handicap parking
spaces and wheelchair access to the public shitters.

Another way we define underclass is as "losers." People who cannot talk, think, or act like middle class professional and managerial workers, people who cannot even be posers. There is absolutely no excuse for these people. We've got television 24/7 to show 'em how to behave. They could learn to act like the blue collar workers we see on the endless reruns of The King of Queens (an American sitcom about a parcel service delivery truck driver.). They could at least be funny and amiable fer godz sake.

From reading the studies, I can see that social scientists dislike plural nouns, and thus shun the word losers. So they call this the "educational underclass." Either way, it comes down to folks too wooly and uncurried for office water cooler society. Nobody is denying that they all should have jobs, of course, just nowhere near the water cooler.

Yes, eight to eighty, crippled blind or crazy, Americans generally agree that every man or woman in America should have a full time job, except those women who manage to snag a wealthy man. They are exempt, as are the middle class commissariat's own beer guzzling spawn keeping the pizza delivery and the all-night video arcade businesses thriving in college towns across the republic.

Then you've got your moral underclass. Like the rest of us, they come in two major varieties -- male and female. Females who don't bother to get married before they have babies (the non-technical term is "welfare sluts"), and men who have things more serious on their national police state blotters than a parking ticket. "Non-mainstreamers," in socio-demographic speak. Many of these are men who say, "Screw it, I ain't gonna even bother to work my ass off and be treated like dirt for six bucks an hour. I'd rather shoot pool." Me too.

The unwed mothers come in two varieties. There are those who decide they want children, but are choosy about the husband that traditionally comes with the deal. And there are those who are so young and naive due to cultural circumstance and environment they do not know what this country does to, not for, single mothers. They often find themselves working at least part time (workfare), yet permanently institutionalized into poverty by our social services industry, instead of being lifted out of it. More than 45 percent of U.S. single mothers are poor, compared to five percent in Sweden and Finland, where no stigma is attached and substantial public resources are applied to child health and development. But research done in Europe shows that even if U.S. women had a zero rate of single motherhood, poverty among American women would still be higher than in European and other socially advanced nations.

Armchair sociologist that I am, I have a theory about this: Millions of American women are in poverty because they are paid poverty wages. I could be wrong, I often am, but there seems to be a connection between poverty and money. I started developing this theory last year when I was in a Melbourne, Australia hotel and learned from a single mother hotel housekeeper there that she made $19 an hour, had government assisted childcare and was going to college at night toward becoming a medical technician. Hmmm... Over here we tell single mothers, "Get a six dollar an hour job or get married bitch! Workfare, baby, workfare." Then too, contrary to the American middle class belief system, out-of-wedlock babies are increasing at all levels of white American society. Even more contrary to popularly held notions, as many of these children turn out to be as well adjusted people as do children of the middle class. But for damned sure poorer in most cases.

And finally we have simple snottiness as a line of underclass demarcation -- one's manner of physical gesture or accent. Believe me from personal experience, a Southern accent in America is no ticket to the top. But even with a Southern accent, if you talk like a college grad, don't wear bib overhauls or gang banger gear, and appear to know where South America is on a map, Americans will deem you middle class. Actually, if you smile a lot, and sound like any sort of white customer service type, it will fly. It's called having the appropriate social and cultural skill set. Yeah, right, appropriate to be hired as a telemarketer so you can piss people off by interrupting their dinner hour.

But even if you gather aluminum cans from dumpsters for a living, with effort, you can "pass" like light skinned black folks used to do in this country. As testimony to this, I, who am a high school dropout with a Southern accent, have successfully managed entire magazine publishing groups for a living. (The secret is balls.) If I'd been black or Hispanic though, I'd have been distributing the urinal cakes in the rest rooms at night. So yes, there is a slight edge to whiteness, though not nearly as much as minorities assume. Still, you gotta make the most of that little edge.

In the end, race, gender or sexual preference are just moving parts of the class machine, with middle class perceptions setting the standard. You can indeed be black or queer, but with the properly buffed patina of white middle class mojo you can make it to the top, or near to the top of the heap (in America, proximity to the top of our cultural garbage heap is everything). All the rest of us are mere consumer refuse, as the Michael Jackson Morbidity Festival demonstrated. You can even be celebrated as an icon of diversity if you act white and middle class enough. Obama is Harvard white guy enough, Ellen DeGeneres is going strong ten years after coming out, gay Congressman Barney Franks still gets reelected. They've all got white middle class mojo. Al Sharpton on the other hand, has cootie mojo. (Tip for Al: They need golf cart drivers at the Congressional Country Club. A year of that and you'd know all you need to know about the white mojo shtick.
Because you can watch Obama play golf there).

When it comes to the underclass, there is no arguing that some people are members because they are so damned uneducated they cannot count their toes or read well enough to fill out a job app, the causes of which are too deep and tangled to go into at the moment. Others just don't care to do the smiling grammatically correct wimp assed customer service zombie thing. They prefer swinging a bigger hammer than that -- doing real work, like America used to do. And doing it without kissing ass, which is why they are called the "permanently jobless." As sociologist Christopher Jencks points out, "There is no absolute standard dictating what people need to know in order to get along in society. There is however, an absolute rule that you get along better if you know what the elite knows than if you do not." He also cautions that "the term underclass combines so many different meanings that social scientists must use it with extreme care."

Which is fine. But I'm no social scientist. If in my travels and experience in American life I see that tens of millions of Americans being screwed silly by a handful of chiselers at the top, or if I see one percent of Americans earning as much annually as the bottom 45 percent of Americans, then that 45 percent is an underclass. When I see a 70-year-old man on his second pacemaker limping through Wal-Mart as a "greeter" so he can pay at least something on last winter's heating bill this month, then he is part of an underclass. When I see the humiliated single mom waitress tugging downward on the ridiculously short red plastic skirt she must wear at the Hooter's type joint so her crotch won't show, she's part of an underclass of humiliated and socially oppressed people. Screw the hairsplitting about who qualifies as underclass and what color they are. Just fix it. Or reap the consequences.

We're finally starting to hear a little discussion about the white underclass in this country. Mainly because so many middle class folks are terrified of falling into it. Frankly, I hope they do. We've got room for them. All the lousy, humiliating jobs have not yet been outsourced. The Devil still has plenty for them to do down here.

Call all of this anecdotal evidence. You won't be the first. I was on a National Public Radio show last year with a couple of political consultants, demographers as I remember. One, a lady, was obviously part of the Democratic political syndicate, the other was part of the Republican political mob. The Democratic expert said dismissively of my remarks, "Well! Some people here seem to believe anecdotal evidence is relevant." Meaning me. I held my tongue. But what I wanted to say was this:

Sister, most of us live anecdotal lives in an anecdotal world. We survive by our wits and observations, some casual, others vital to our sustenance. That plus daily experience, be it good bad or ugly as the ass end of a razorback hog. And what we see happening to us and others around us is what we know as life, the on-the-ground stuff we must deal with or be dealt out of the game. There's no time for rigorous scientific analysis. Nor need. We can see the guy next door who's drinking himself to death because, "I never did have a good job, just heavy labor, but now I'm all busted up, got no insurance and no job and it looks like I'll never have another one and I've got four more years to go before Social Security." He doesn't need scientific proof. He doesn't need another job either. He needs a cold beer, a soft armchair, some Tylenol PM and a modest guarantee of security for the rest of his life. Freedom from fear and toil and illness.

And furthermore, Sister, we cannot see much evidence that other, more elite people's scientific analysis of our lives has ever benefited us much. When you're fucked, you know it. You don't need scientific verification.

I wanted to say that on the radio. But I didn't. The little white guy mojo voice in my head told me not to. So I just laughed good naturedly. Like any other good American.

May God forgive me.

With ironic gratitude to Christopher Jencks of the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University.
_______

About author
Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Random House Crown), about working class America. A complete archive of Joe's essays can be found at http://www.joebageant.com.