The two main ladders of upward mobility, unions and college degrees, are either being dismantled or being put increasingly out of reach for more and more people. Now they are about to face the reality millions face in third world countries:
More than anything else, class now determines Americans' fates. The old inequalities — racism, sexism, homophobia — are increasingly antiquated [fig. 1]. Women are threatening to overwhelm men in the workplace, and the utter collapse of the black lower middle class in the age of Obama — a catastrophe for the African-American community — has little to do with prejudice and everything to do with brute economics. Who wins and who loses has become simplified, purified: those who own and those who don't. Meanwhile Great Britain, the source of the class system, has returned, plain and simple, to its old aristocratic masters [fig. 2]. Reverting to type, the overlords and the underclass seem little removed from their eighteenth-century predecessors. The overlords preach shared sacrifice from their palaces and the underclass riots [fig. 3] and the middle classes quietly judge. Everybody knows where he stands.
Not in America. In the United States, the emerging aristocracy remains staunchly convinced that it is not an aristocracy, that it's the result of hard work and talent. The permanent working poor refuse to accept that their poverty is permanent. The class system is clandestine.
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The ultimate goal of neoliberalism/economic libertarianism is to install an aristocracy by means of public policy. The final nail in the coffin is when or if the estate tax is completely repealed.
Most people are still in the dark over what is going on. When there are fuel and food shortages, THAT is when people will finally take to the streets and riot. The "occupy movement" was destined to fail because our would-be aristocrats could easily co-opt or shut them down thanks in large part to the movement's nonviolent nature.
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