The Middle Class Facade

American politicians always talk about the Middle Class. "We need to create jobs for the middle class" they will claim, talking as if their duty revolves around a middle class without acknowledging any class warfare. I believe our economic crisis is highlighting that the idea of a middle class is false. The Middle Class does not exist.

There was a report on the BBC about homelessness in the US having a new personality. These new homeless are people who lived in suburbia, what we'd all consider the middle class average American family. This is the new homeless. In a year people who we thought of as Middle Class are out on the streets. That is how volatile the economy is for the so called middle class. In reality, there is no such thing as a middle class. There are two classes, the owner class, and the worker class, akin to the Patricians and Plebeians of ancient Rome. The worker class, of all walks of life, work more and more and get less and less for their labor. This is a pattern across the country.

Class seems to be based on how much a person has, right? Wealth. But what is wealth? Wealth is based on labor. Labor is the only way to create real wealth. The so-called middle class had to labor at an obscene rate to be able to afford what we consider a "comfortable life." But a white collar worker, who works 80+ hours a week, maybe multiple jobs, is just as much in the lower class as a Taxi driver in Thailand working the same amount of time. This is a comfortable life? The white collar American and the taxi driver both do not have control over their own created wealth, their own labor. The only way to really get out of the working or lower class is to own your own land, or business. According to the American Chronicle, 80 percent of new businesses in the US fail. That was a report from 2006, I bet that number is much higher now. Since land is scarce and very expensive it would take many years of hard labor and frugal living to be able to become a significant landowner. This is no different from ancient Rome, or any other ancient civilizations that made it extremely difficult for the lower class to have any "real" wealth. Yet, we claim to be so much more advanced than any of these people because of our "middle class."

We tend to think we have a middle class because we have a lot of people that can afford I-phones, and computers, and cars. But the only reason that these things are affordable are so those on the top can profit. The people have to labor longer and harder in order to buy these things, and if they still cannot they go into what we call debt. The so-called Middle Class is the Debt Class. Most of this debt is not from frivolous spending as those with all of the wealth would like us to think. It's for things like a home, a car (with the main purpose of commuting to work!), education, health costs, things that should be considered necessities for all people of our society. That is why people are in debt, because they can't afford those necessities, despite all of their labor. This is pure economic slavery, and to think otherwise denies the true nature of credit. Credit and loans are ways for banks to make money without contributing anything to society. In fact, what they do is take those necessities away from people. It is a facade to say we have a middle class, when the gap between the "poor" and the "middle" is like the difference between a D- and a D in school, while the gap between the "middle" and the "upper" class is like the difference between a D and an A+.