Murder One

“Behind the veil of Oz, there is nothing but bluff.” Christopher Hitchens

My wife is watching the Oscars. Of the nominated films, we only saw Django Unchained and Silver Linings Playbook; I enjoyed the former and thought the latter was so-so; Jennifer Lawrence, sorry, I don’t see the reason for all the hype about your performance. Queen of Young Hollywood say the industry parasites and celebrity gawkers.

Whatever.

Chelsea Football Club lost to Manchester City today, 2-nil. My boys played poorly, conceded too much space, and lost the battle for midfield. I can’t stand interim manager Rafa Benitez – he’s an arrogant poser, a walking travesty who should never have been given the reins of Chelsea Football Club.

But the trials of Chelsea FC is not what preoccupies me tonight; I’m thinking about technology, all the fabulous gizmos and gadgets at our disposal: tablets, smart phones, super thin laptops, flat screen TV’s, wireless access points, social media, instant this, real time that.

Back in the day we thought technology would liberate us from drudgery and tedium, increase our leisure time, but it’s obvious we missed an off-ramp on the way to the Promised Land. Americans have technology galore, but what we don’t have is the leisure time to enjoy it. 

Americans are work beasts. We put in more hours on the job than any people on the planet, take fewer vacation days and, when we do get away, we remain tethered to the office by cell phone, e-mail, text message or social media. We listen to voice mail messages while standing in line for the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland; tap out e-mail responses on the beach at Cancun; become apoplectic if the Wifi service at the Red Roof Inn doesn’t work.

Ironically, all this frenzied labor isn’t making us richer, at least not those of us stuck in the lower middle class where more often than not we walk a paycheck-to-paycheck tightrope.

Woe to the family that makes a misstep.

We’re still clawing our way back from the financial meltdown of 2008 and the millions of jobs that vanished like morning fog; unemployment remains persistently high, wages stubbornly flat. Not surprisingly, fewer people doing more work pushes productivity off the chart, but the spoils of our bounty flow to the owners and investors, the financiers behind the velvet curtain, who win when we lose and profit by our misery.

The wages of American workers have remained stagnant for decades and the employer sponsored benefit plans we once counted on have either disappeared altogether or become so paltry as to be meaningless; we’re on our own in ways our parents never were. 

How did it come to this? When did working people lose the war of ideas, and by that I mean the idea of shared prosperity in the workplace. The Fat Cats and their media mouthpieces and lobbyists flipped our world on its head, seized the national narrative and made it their own; capital, they declared, is more important than labor; wealth is more valued than work; the rich are more deserving than the poor. They bought the politicians and judges and rigged the system so perversely that the more workers produced, the less reward workers received.

It seems to me that the revolution started with Reagan, but it was a revolution of the velvet variety because there was little sustained protest from the working class; while the Fat Cats and money-changers picked our pockets, we argued about gun control and abortion, evolution and creationism, Monica Lewinsky and Bubba Clinton, and we swallowed enormous quantities of 100-proof Kool-Aid that made many of us believe that the answer to a better tomorrow was to look out only for ourselves and our own interests.

In this diminished and heartless era working people – when mentioned in the national debate at all – are considered disposable, bought at the lowest possible price and dumped when cheaper versions are found. Money is mobile and corporations have no loyalty to anything but profit.

It’s a class war pure and simple, rich and super rich against the middle class and working poor, and the numbers on the big scoreboard don’t lie. To use a football analogy, the rich are like Manchester United and the poor are like Queens Park Rangers – in other words, no contest. Police, firefighters, nurses, teachers, postal clerks and food inspectors are treated as parasitic drains on state and local governments, grossly overpaid, underworked dolts who contribute nothing to the common good.

That’s the lie repeated over and over by lazy reporters and corporate shills.

Our great nation can afford to spend more on its military than all other developed countries combined, but it can’t afford to pay workers a living wage or provide them humane benefits. We can afford to cut taxes for the wealthy again and again and again, but when it comes to the huddled masses, we bow before the Austerity gods. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, Grover Norquist, Karl Rove, Scott Walker and the Koch Brothers demand the destruction of public employee unions; we must slash their pensions, suppress their wages – or face Armageddon.

As the Oscars drone on in the background, I’m thinking, with a mixture of wonder and disgust, that the greatest transfer of wealth in human history and the premeditated murder of the American Dream happened during my lifetime.