Dancing on the Grave of the Working Class

Recent dispatches from the one-sided class war suggest that the rich have taken to not just walking over the working class but dancing on its grave.

TARP, for instance, has turned out to be little more than socialism for the rich, with the needs of everyday folks nowhere to be found (even though they were in the original plan). With the interests of homeowners and others ignored, TARP has become "little more than a
giveaway to Wall Street executives," as Neil M. Barofsky, the special inspector general for TARP, argued in the NYT.  Meanwhile, in one of the few pieces of real


investigative reporting to come out of the paper of record in a long time on the subject of how capitalism works, it turns out that GE not only doesn't pay taxes, it sucked a tax benefit out of the government to the tune of $3.2 billion last year. And we're going after those parasitic public unions? Really?


Over in the LA Times, my novelist friend Dean Bakopolous argued last month that as a result of stagnating wages, foreclosure, rotten health care, and now attempts to destroy what remains of collective bargaining, "We're all scared; we're all dependent; we're all working class now." Only problem is that we may share the material insecurity of the working class, but we don't share a sense of working-class destiny--except in the rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol.


Speaking of state government, perhaps the most telling event in all of this grave dancing has been the removal of the giant labor history murals in the Department of Labor in Maine, a more overt form of erasure than we're accustomed to seeing but nonetheless clearly part of the pattern. Working people? What working people?

Finally, Bob Herbert, in his farewell NYT column, asks the question that haunts the whole operation: how can we always afford war when we need to, but we can rarely afford to take care of what matters at home? "When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young," he argues, "it has lost its way entirely." Hard to argue with that.