The rot begins at the core

Ford is going to close its plant in Hapeville, GA. That's south of Atlanta near the airport. General Motors last year announced it was closing its plant in Doraville, north of the city. These are among the last heavy industrial plants in Georgia. Certainly the last American-owned ones.

I found it interesting, when I was listening to an NPR report on the closing of the Doraville plant, that the workers got wages larger than my salary. Industrial wages that could support a family at a middle-class level; wages that had nothing to do with the formal level of education. The industrial workplace was one in which men and women with limited education were first exploited, and then, with the advent of unions and their success, paid a living wage. Bit by bit, that guarantee of a middle-class life for working class families is being eaten away. Yet, oddly, the very people who will lose out will cheerfully, proudly vote for people who will not only do nothing to halt the process, they will accelerate it.

The welfare state had (and has) its flaws, but as it rots away we can see the shape of the predatory capitalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, triumphant and triumphalist. The suffering poor? Their fault. The working poor? Let them turn to Jesus. We are in a second gilded age; alas, without a Mark Twain to limn it.

Twain's commentary on the US's behaviour in the Philippines presages the 'War on Terror' very directly:

I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling
camps;
They have builded him an altar in the Eastern dews and damps;
I
have read his doomful mission by the dim and flaring lamps --
His night is
marching on.

I have read his bandit gospel writ in burnished rows
of steel:
"As ye deal with my pretensions, so with you my wrath shall deal;
Let the faithless son of Freedom crush the patriot with his heel;
Lo,
Greed is marching on!"

We have legalized the strumpet and are
guarding her retreat;*
Greed is seeking out commercial souls before his
judgement seat;
O, be swift, ye clods, to answer him! be jubilant my feet!
Our god is marching on!

In a sordid slime harmonious Greed was
born in yonder ditch,
With a longing in his bosom -- and for others' goods
an itch.
As Christ died to make men holy, let men die to make us rich --
Our god is marching on.