There seems to be something akin to an actual plan to charge the plebs everything they earn to cover food, shelter, and basic necessities and further, to drive them into debt servitude to the tune of 5% - 10% of annual income per year.
From The Baffler, May 2022:
The postmortems were swift and decisive. Despite winning the popular vote, Hillary Clinton had lost key Rust Belt States. Which meant she had been rejected by working-class voters—those white guys in hard hats. This analysis could be indirect or straight-on. Mark Lilla wrote on the New York Times op-ed page that Clinton’s loss was a rejection of “identity liberalism.” By acknowledging the interests of traditionally disfavored groups, she turned off “the white working class and those with strong religious convictions,” Lilla argued. Two days after the election, Joan C. Williams, author of White Working Class (2017), wrote for the Harvard Business Review that Clinton lost because blue-collar whites saw in her “the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite.” Even Bernie Sanders, the so-called paragon of coalition building on the left, found himself deferring to the public narrative. “It is not good enough to have a liberal elite,” Sanders said on a CBS This Morning interview less than a week after election day. “I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to where I came from.”
There was nothing new in this critique of a losing Democratic campaign. When Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale, a labor-friendly former vice president from Minnesota, in 1984, a series of focus groups led by the pollster Stanley Greenberg zeroed in on working-class voters in Macomb County, Michigan, who Greenberg famously labeled as “Reagan Democrats.” As one reporter noted at the time, Greenberg “found that these working-class whites interpreted Democratic calls for economic fairness as code for transfer payments to African Americans.” The New York Times reported a few days after the 1984 election that exit polls showed Mondale winning 90 percent of the African American vote. Yet Mondale apparently had been unable, in the Sanders formulation, to “talk to where I came from.”
There’s no dispute that general working-class support for Democrats has fluctuated from election cycle to election cycle. The one constant, though, is that “working-class” is almost always used in the media to suggest white, male workers. The representative Reagan Democrat was, literally, a white autoworker in Michigan. Even when the white prefix is used to indicate a specific research interest—as in Joan Williams’s White Working Class—there is still an unspoken assumption that this is the part of the working class that matters most. White workers were supposedly neglected in the 2016 campaigns, and so we ended up with Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton.
Last year, I spent time talking to workers involved in the Fight for $15 campaign. One of them, Deatric Edie, a then-forty-two-year-old mother of four in Florida, was working three jobs at fast food franchises, at hourly wages of $11, nearly $10, and $8.65, respectively. “My whole life is dedicated to working,” she said. The American labor force is teeming with workers like Edie, but when they get media attention, they are more often classified as “the working poor” than as simply the American working class. Few reporters assigned to dig into working-class sentiment would turn to someone like Edie—a Black woman who has suffered from extended housing instability—as a typical voice of working-class discontent, despite the inherent understanding that people like Edie have about the ways that class, gender, and race interact to subjugate the most marginalized communities in the working-class service industry, and despite their overrepresentation in that field. “They said that ‘Black Lives Matter,’” Edie remarked to me. “But they’re still not protecting us. The health and economic security of Black workers, our voices, are still not being heard.”
The United States, however, is much closer now than it was in the era of the Reagan Democrats to a transformation, a point at which the working class will no longer be predominantly white. According to Census Bureau projections, we are still about twenty years away from the tipping point when the population as a whole is more than 50 percent non-white. But we are about ten years away from the point where people of color will represent a majority of the working class, according to a 2016 report by Valerie Rawlston Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy. Defined in this context as workers with less than a bachelor’s degree, in 2013, about two-thirds of the entire workforce was “working class.” But the white share of that bloc is falling and is likely to dip below 50 percent by 2032.
Business Bites Back....
....MUCH MORE
Meanwhile laptop warriors, as we noted the day before Friday's inflation report:
Yes, yes, there's something about inflation coming out as well, but seriously, aren't you getting just a bit tired of the transitory crowd switching to "look, look, we've passed the peak" and treating each report as a fresh supply of factoids they can isolate and cherry-pick: "yeahbut used car prices are way down." Yeahbut, yeahbut, yeahbut.
As if they think they are winning points in a junior high school debate.
It's just so tedious....
Earlier today:
"Boris Johnson tells workers to accept pay cuts or UK faces 1970s–style ‘stagflation’"
"Ben Franklin on Labor Economics (or how to create an underclass)"
