The Cynical Times hereby honors reader Bert Wolfe as a “Working Class Hero” for his wonderfully insightful explanation of the global forces now battering the faltering middle class.
The 61-year-old Pennsylvania man’s comments in response to “Why Hillary Lost” were better than the story itself in some ways. Bert indicated that he realizes the human race is slipping toward global corporate feudalism.
“The emerging New World Order will become a multinational corporation dominated worldwide fascist order,” Bert wrote, citing the book Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty. “A worldwide neofeudalism in which the plutocrats and the corporate executives constitute the very tiny new feudal aristocracy (of) modern day feudal lords.”
It’s very special for any American to succeed in sorting through all the misinformation and propaganda now barraging us to reach this kind of inherent truth. Nothing less than an embodiment of the mythical “Working Class Hero.”
Unlike so many Americans, who think the changes hitting us are cyclic, Bert clearly understands they’re not.
That in itself represents a miraculous victory over the massive lie machines that mainstream news organizations like CNN, Fox News, Gannett and MSNBC have become.
“As the New Worl
d Order quietly, insidiously spreads itself across the American economy, good paying, career track jobs with good benefits are becoming increasingly rare,” said Bert, who has three master’s degrees. “The wages and salaries of the bottom 50 percent of workers are collapsing. Twenty-seven-year-olds are more likely to earn less than $15,000 a year.”
“The large, prosperous and powerful middle class America that developed after WWII will evaporate and disappear,” he said.“Being replaced with a small retainer class of people who provide goods and services to the new aristocracy and to each other…
“Below that will be a huge class of unemployed, underemployed, and sporadically employed people. A huge reserve army of impoverished labor. Modern day feudal serfs, employed and let go as the aristocracy and retainer class need workers.”
These remarks reflect a mature understanding of the rise of a global economy with neither labor protections nor a functioning global government to regulate its excesses. One which enables tyranny and economic slavery.
The context Bert displayed in this comment is very rare. The only thing more rare may be the ability to communicate it effectively to others.
Americans have been taught to compete with one another in these schadenfreud times by turning a blind eye to the suffering of their fellow countrymen and women. We’ve been programmed to revel in our own net gains relative to our neighbors after they lose a job, home or spouse. Rather than lifting them up and standing together against the injustices befalling us all.
This kind of sonderkommando behavior is not the way.
‘We can already see it taking shape,” Bert said. “Decent, good paying, full-time jobs with good benefits are becoming increasingly rare, as a new economy of poorly paid part time jobs and temporary gigs is replacing the old American middle class world of remunerative full-time employment.
“People are desperately clamoring to get themselves, and especially their children, into the elite universities, graduate schools, professions, and firms that will populate the new retainer class.”
Once you understand the larger picture Bert outlined above, the next step is to look beyond the divide-and-conquer rhetoric of group bias advanced by the Predatory 1 Percent. The tactics of fear which have set groups of decent people at one another’s throats.
Bottom line, the people in the developed world who oppose globalism are not racists. They simply do not wish to be leveled with their counterparts in the Third World while the Predatory 1 Percent steals their savings and homes.
They don’t wish to be burdened with all of the financial negatives of globalization, while the sheltered members of Predatory 1 Percent takes all the benefits for themselves.
Likewise, what if the people working against the military imperialism of the global oil trust in the Middle East are not subversives? What if they’re just people trying to regain control of their own lands and governments from the Predatory 1 Percent?
Just like the rest of us.
By the same token, what if the global bankers and investors now printing their own units of currency via derivative investment vehicles are not “Jewish bankers,” as the new Nazis of the Alt-Right would have us believe. What if they’re predatory bankers whose de facto religion has become usury, rather than Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism?
So why does our mainstream news media pretend otherwise?
Why are they pitting the right against the left in a world in which both are being misled by mainstream political parties who habitually represent Wall Street greed at our expense?
“In effect, there is a perve
rse game of musical chairs being played at the moment,” said Bert. “In which middle class people march around the shrinking number of slots, or chairs, in the emerging retainer class, and battle each other to claim a seat when the music stops.
“All are desperate to avoid slipping down into the emerging neofeudal serfdom. Unfortunately, this is a game that most currently middle class people will lose.”
We all need to be more like Bert and cast an unrelenting spotlight on the new economic royals trying to turn us against each other. So we don’t turn on them.
That means understanding that the same voters who gave our nation its first black president in 2008 and re-elected him in 2012 did not turn into Klansmen and women in 2016 as our mainstream news media would like us to believe. And neither did the Brits who supported the Brexit.
They merely awoke to the collective threat posed by the new generation of self-appointed economic corporate and political royals, like the Bushes and Clintons, now trying to enslave us all on behalf of their Wall Street masters.
I don’t know about you, but the displac
ed workers of The Cynical Times’ volunteer staff are not ready to be serfs. We don’t see the movement toward global economic slavery and new hereditary royals as human evolution.
Just the opposite.
The Predatory 1 Percent has given us a choice between them and us, and we vote for us.
Just like Bert.
The former state employee was forced into early retirement by Republican Chris Christie in 2010 after working for the State of New Jersey for 14 years and the New Jersey State League of Municipalities for 14 years. He holds master’s degrees in political science from the University of Akron, public administration from Rutgers-Newark, and American History from Rutgers-Camden.
“I am deeply honored by The Cynical Times naming me as a Working Class Hero,” Bert said. “I have been pounding away at three themes on my Facebook page, in my Facebook blog, Left Perspective, and my online blog for some time now. They are peace, prosperity, and a renewed social contract for the 21st century.”
Bert began the blog in the summer of 2016.
To check out Bert’s blogs at Left Perspective, click here: http://www.leftperspective.com/
