Classes

By David Brooks

From the Mexican newspaper La Jornada

NEW YORK – Occupy Wall street celebrated its first anniversary [last] Monday, while the conditions that detonated the movement – economic inequality; corruption of the political system by the moneybags; ruination of the future for young people by the speculative and deceitful deals of Wall Street and their consequences for communities, development and the environment – have not improved but in some cases have worsened. But something curious also happened in the transformation of the national dialogue (1 percent and 99 percent) provoked by Occupy. Suddenly, an old-fashioned word reappeared: Class.

For decades there has been an enormous effort to say that the United States is a middle-class country (in other words, there are no classes, only one). In the two party conventions, the discourse of all politicians focused on defending, regaining, promoting and celebrating the middle class and its “values.” Any politician who dares to talk about the rich and the poor is accused of promoting a “class war,” that is, he is almost denounced as a Marxist.

Even the alleged representatives of class interests abide by this logic. Some labor unions, for decades, have purposely not used the word “worker” in their names, instead using the word “employees.” They may dare to talk about “working families” but they always insist that the workers are and should be included in “the middle class.”

But reality is funny when it refuses to behave according to the interests and objectives of certain politicians, intellectuals and others who seek to promote an illusion – or are paid to do it. Here, the rich have become richer, the poor have turned poorer and, in terms of income, the middle class is crumbling at an ever more rapid pace.

The Americans themselves are abandoning their illusion of being members of a middle-class society. The percentage of Americans who today identify themselves as “low class” or “low middle class” has gone from 25 percent to 32 percent in the past four years, according to a nationwide survey by the Pew Research Center. Seventy-seven percent of them consider that it is a lot more difficult to emerge from the low class than 10 years ago.

It is interesting that the percentage of those who define themselves as being from the “high class” has also dropped, from 19 percent in 2008 to 15 percent today. The percentage of those who consider themselves middle class has dropped from 53 to 49 in the same period.

All that is based in reality: the U.S. Census Office reported last week that the middle class has dropped to its lowest level since that agency began its surveys, while the inequality in income increased 1.6 percent, the highest rise from one year to another in almost two decades.

In 2011, 60 percent of homes with income between $20,000 and $101,000 a year earned 46.6 percent of the total income, a 1.5 percent reduction. Meanwhile, the richest 20 percent boosted its income by 1.6 percent. The wealthiest 5 percent (with income above $186,000) enjoyed an increase of 5 percent.

In other words, the economic recovery, though anemic, has benefited only the rich. Meanwhile, the rate of poverty, 15 percent or 46.2 million people, remained unchanged since last year, but that figure includes a record number of poor people.

The alleged recovery has been the same as the recession. The median income in homes plummeted in the two years following the end of the Great Recession by the same percentage as the two years of that crisis – 4.1 percent – according to the Census bureau.
Most of the jobs lost during the recession earned mid-level wages, while most of the jobs generated during the alleged recovery have earned low-level wages, according to The new ork Times.

“The American dream is a myth; it is dead,” says economist Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate, in his book The Price of Inequality.

All this has revived an intense debate about poverty, classes and subclasses, concerning the intensification of the economic inequality, as well as the consolidation of classes that are increasingly distant, both in economic and socio-cultural terms.

“The growing class division in the United States has an unavoidable influence on all the facets of our lives, not only on how much money we make or how healthy we are, but also on what we think and believe,” wrote professor and researcher Richard Florida of New York University in USA Today.

The politicians, including the presidential candidates, continue to talk about something that no longer exists: the United States where the majority considered itself as middle class but accepted all kinds of contributions from the wealthiest to maintain that status quo. And, as denounced with great effect by Occupy one year ago, the owners of that money, above all the financiers, threaten what remains of democracy.

Last week, former President Jimmy Carter denounced the “financial corruption” in the U.S. electoral process. “We have one of the worst electoral processes in the world and it is almost completely because of the excessive flow of money,” he said at the Carter Center, as reported by The Associated Press.

Some acknowledge that this conflict between classes is not new but something that was born with this system but was disguised and concealed for many years. On its first birthday, Occupy Wall street managed to spark a new national debate, focused on the conflict between the ruling circles and the rest, with its own vocabulary.

The powerful do not like to be seen naked. There’s a reason why so many policemen are present every time that those who speak of classes take to the streets. As always, they are a danger because they call things by their proper name.