Parasites Lost

 "We're viruses with shoes."~ Bill Hicks


Sunday, January 29, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Doug Harvey

 

I once asked a Native American if he thought whether North America was in any way in a post-colonial period. His response was, “Have they left yet?” Of the New World republics that came about as a result of colonization, the United States is going to have the hardest time dealing with its past. Recently, we’ve seen a lot of people willing to strut about with their guns and imagine themselves in some pre-pubescent fantasy of John Wayne’s “unbridled individualism.” Some become so deluded as to be willing to use these guns on perceived “enemies.” But this is symptomatic only; it is useful to remember how the actual land of North America came to be claimed by European and Euro-American colonists. More importantly, the causes of these neuroses can be better understood when one realizes what separating people from their resource base means.

For over ninety-nine percent of human history, the earth and its human offspring were united. Humans were unique in the degree to which we could fashion natural products into useful items. With our minds, hands, and intuition we made the stuff of the earth more useful to us. Nothing stood between us and our resources – we were immersed in our environment and what we did to improve our surroundings and make our lives better we ourselves enjoyed. As the Thoreau disciple and wilderness advocate Bradford Angier once pointed out, “The hardest part about roughing it is smoothing it.” We were pretty good at “smoothing it.” Even cave paintings, figurines, Petroglyphs and the like helped people to understand their relationship with the world into which they had emerged. Contrary to the assumptions of the old “Whig” histories, people were generally time-rich – indeed, they could easily make more than they needed. These surplus goods could be traded for others’ surplus goods and the fruits of individuals’ skills could be shared. At some point someone began to think about accumulating these surplus goods. How, the calculating mind asked, might I enjoy these manufactures and the potential wealth they represent without having to engage in this difficult work myself? Many methods were tried with varying degrees of success. But one that did work and continues to work was coercion – physical, political, legal, economic – forcing a wedge between people and their resource base (the land) and make their reunion with it conditional. The condition for this reunion with the “means of production” is a controlling cut of the wealth produced by the interaction of human and other-than-human nature.

This division between people and nature put us on a path many are beginning to question. Besides the sense of alienation being cut off from our natural relationships with the other-than-human world produces, we are separated from our own means of production. Now, instead of using our wits and our hands to mold the stuff of the earth into usefulness, we have to go to the bourgeois “owner” and ask him to buy our labor, since it is often all we have since being deprived of our access to resources. The bourgeoisie figured out that if you usurp the land and resources, you have control of interaction between human and other-than-human – also known as labor power, which is the only real power humans have.

This defense of the relationship between humans and their resources should in no way be construed as a defense of, say, corporate access to the minerals of the Grand Canyon or oil in the Arctic. That is a looting of both nature and labor that I have discussed elsewhere. No, we have come so far down the path of exploitation of both human and other-than-human nature that assumptions and myths regarding the righteousness of this path remain unquestioned from the halls of power to the public discourse.

The surplus of useful goods that was often so abundant in pre-modern communities – under the influence of market-obsession, has acquired an exchange-value separate from its use. The result is “capital,” or surplus-value flowing to the bourgeoisie but which they themselves did not produce. Capital bought and still buys power and influence to entrench this economic system and heavily skew it toward the bourgeoisie – a sort of modern feudalism. A wedge was driven between people and their resources. Having been deracinated – alienated from their resources, homes, families, and livelihood – people had nothing to sell but their labor, and oftentimes the going rate was at starvation levels. In some regions where this deracination is at full throttle, many have chosen suicide over this type of slavery.

In North America, this separation of the land from the indigenous peoples took on an unprecedented scope. While there was certainly plenty of room in North America in 1492, there were still no fewer than five to ten million people who, in most respects, lived off the fat of an abundant land. Then, Europeans and unwilling and unwitting Africans came to the New World. With varying degrees, separating indigenous people from the land became an institution and was developed to the point of becoming a national myth: of course the Indians must be removed in the face of “progress” – removed or exterminated. Cold hard fact that it is we have yet to internalize this as a society; denial or ignorance of this history remains rampant in the U.S.

The denial becomes increasingly difficult as the separation of people from property takes on new dimensions, (if nothing else, the bourgeois class is very creative about accumulating wealth and power). Now, newcomers as well as descendents of the original colonizers – who themselves usurped the land – have found themselves being separated from their resources by a rigged system in which they have no say. Some might call this karma and that may be true, but it is certainly a continuation.

Working people took a stand in the U.S. from the Industrial Revolution to the post-World War II era and created the wealthiest working class in history. It was so successful that this working class took to calling itself the “middle class,” a democratization of the original turf held by the bourgeoisie and characterized by untitled wealth. Many people once again had a say in their relationship between themselves and their tools and resources. They did not go to the so-called “owner” with hat in hand begging to sell their labor, they collectively bargained with him to get a reasonable share of the surplus value they were producing. Some would say these negotiations were a gift to the bourgeoisie from producers who cut them more slack than they deserved. The abandonment of the American working class by the bourgeoisie, by their politicians, and even by their unions, has been nothing short of a betrayal and indeed a form of robbery.

The wealth accumulated by hook or by crook and used to manipulate the economy and political power structure is turned against the people who produced it. The old tried and true strategy of divide and conquer – white and blue collar, black and white skin, English- and Spanish-speaking, male and female, etc., etc., ad nauseum – so far still works. The financialization of the economy has turned Wall Street into a giant Las Vegas, operating – at least in part – independently of actual wealth production – subsidized and insured by taxing those who actually do produce wealth. It must keep moving fast, though, because something is gaining on it. The separation of workers from the wealth they produce; of workers from their resources; of humans from nature, is a contrivance that cannot last.

People are looking for that part of themselves that is connected to everything else. There is a deep cognitive dissonance in the U.S. resulting from a simple historical truth: wealth enjoyed by many American citizens came from resources acquired through systematic conquest and pillage. It makes it particularly hard to defend your resources on moral grounds when they were stolen to begin with. Much easier to deny or invent an alternative narrative.

Parasites often kill their hosts. To the extent that humans have become parasites, of labor and/or the resource base, we act for our own destruction. The short-term thinking institutionalized in this system is an indulgence we can no longer afford. One alternative to the path of exploitation remains vaguely familiar to us: the path of husbandry and cooperation. But alternative paths require introspection, a difficult facing of fears and facts and, finally, understanding what the relationship between humans and the earth means. As people have known for over ninety-nine percent of our history, the earth is literally our mother – our source of life. It is human nature to interact with our environment and treat it with the respect it deserves – as a part of ourselves. We act self-destructively when we assume the exploitative attitude of parasites. As with most problems, the answers are in the mirror, which is why they don’t get solved.

Meet the Global Ruling Class

Telling the Players With a Scorecard

by STEVEN COLATRELLA

Padua, Italy.

Making economics and politics appear separate is one of the chief characteristics of capitalism as a system of class rule, as Ellen Mieksins Wood has pointed out in many of her writings. But it is how politics is manifested AS economics and economics AS politics that should concern us especially right now.

Today a general strike is paralyzing Portugal, as workers there protest the loss of job security through legal changes, and the wage cuts (through elimination of 13^th and 14^th months of pay, which are standard in many European countries where monthly wages are not that high) that are essential parts of the austerity program approved last week to please the Troika (IMF, European Central Bank and EU Commission). Fitch announced this afternoon that is downgrading Portugal’s bonds to junk status.

In the streets of Cairo clashes have taken place over six days, and hundreds of thousands have gathered for several days in a row demanding that the military junta cede power to civilian rule so that the process of democratization supposedly won in the February Revolution can go forward again. Standard and Poor just cut Egypt’s sovereign bond ratings “deeper into junk status”.

The message is: bond ratings are a reflection of how well a local government successfully suppresses working class and popular revolt. That is lesson 1.

Lesson 2: The downgraded bond rating is also intended to back that government up in suppressing such opposition, by limiting options, requiring even stricter and more painful austerity. This has been very much the point of externally-imposed austerity programs for more than 30 years, in the form of structural adjustment programs of the IMF and World Bank, and more recently across Europe and the US. Further, the organized, collective purchase or non-purchase of a country’s sovereign debt is a primary means by which the capitalist class, especially its best organized sector finance, controls and limits the policy options available to any government. Hence the famous exchange recorded in Bob Woodward’s “The Choice” in which newly elected Bill Clinton rants about how the bond market is controlling his presidency.

Lesson 3: “market” is an abstraction. What is abstracts is a set of identifiable players, fewer than it might seem at first, since the concerted, coordinated or simply coincidental actions of a few very large banks and investors can make a huge difference on a given day when concentrated on a single country.

This leads to Lesson 4: There is an increasingly united, increasingly global ruling class, who act collectively through a set of institutions that I call, using that classes’ own phrase for it “global governance”. Global governance includes four different kinds of organizations:

• Most obviously, the specifically global governance organizations themselves, that is institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO, EU Commission, UN Security Council and a plethora of less central agencies involved with energy, environment, management of the seas and so forth.

• Informal gatherings, some official, some not, ranging from the annual World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland to the right wing’s favorite conspiratorial suspect the Bilderberg Group, to the Trilateral Commission to the G20 summits, to the European Council summits. The importance of these in shaping and enforcing, through peer pressure, or what one scholar called “elite socialization” should not be underestimated. Nelson Mandela describes how it was at Davos in the 1990s, when he was the world’s most famous and esteemed leader, that he was convinced by the consensus of other world leaders to abandon the promises of his own ANC’s Freedom Charter with its call to make the wealth and resources of South Africa property of the whole people and instead to work for free markets, foreign investment and trade. Any process more convincing than a lifetime as leader of a revolutionary movement and 27 years of suffering in prison for it should be taken seriously.

• Central Banks. These are now Fifth Columns in every democratic republic. Their “independence” – of elected officials, constitutional niceties and control by the people – is a requirement by capital worldwide as a precondition for even dealing with countries, as it was for creating the European Union and the Euro. These act as political leadership for the banking and investment industries as a whole, guiding financial movements, setting initial conditions, such as money supply and interest rates, so that the options available to other actors are restricted. While these are national in general the ECB is of course above and outside of any national government’s control, which was the whole point of it, indeed is the whole point of central banks in general today. That the ECB’s new head, Mario Draghi was able to oust elected (if execrable) prime minister Silvio Berlusconi by not buying Italian state bonds for a few days a couple of weeks ago makes clear my point. Investors followed Draghi’s lead and the result was that the whole Euro zone was nearly capsized as it took time for Draghi’s adjustment in buying Italian bonds to turn the ship around again once it was clear that finance has won and their direct rule, in the form of the unelected government of new PM Mario Monti, former head of the Italian central bank and ex-Goldman Sachs executive, was guaranteed.

• A number of private but collective actors such as banks, investors and especially ratings agencies – the big three Standard and Poor, Fitch and Moody’s to whom anti-trust rules apparently do not apply, since if they did any country that applied them would be subject to a downgrade similar to the one that S and P carried out on the US rating this past year to put pressure on for more austerity during the Debt Ceiling crisis there. That no such downgrade of say, Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns or any of the other disasters on Wall St. took place has not been the subject of an investigation, let alone of any arrests and charges, or to be really absurd the cancelling of the ratings agencies’ charters and their being closed down for good in favor of a governmental or inter-governmental, non-profit and neutral body to rate companies and public credit worthiness should not surprise us. Do anything of the sort and your credit will be downgraded, costing you a fortune in higher interest rates to sell your bonds, or even a shriveling of credit resulting from your meddling in ruling class matters.
  

These actors, though distinct, not always in perfect agreement and coming from different points of view at times, are nevertheless part of the same overall division of labor (no pun intended, but irony yes) for capital: they constitute, in their ensemble as global governance a political force, a political party of sorts if you like, able to act in concert, and whose general perspective will be similar as a result of the elite socialization process that serves to unite the private and public sector, the national and global organization actors into a single class.

How else to explain why Obama, Mandela and his successors, Lula and others so easily end up carrying out the same essential policies? How better to understand why everyone at the G20 agreed that Greek Prime Minister Papandreos’ call for a national referendum so the Greek people could decide their own fate, and judge whether the wrecking of their national economy and social fabric was too high a price to pay for membership in the Euro was an act of insanity and in bad taste besides?

So Lesson 5, summing up what we have learned: whenever you see economics, especially when it seems to be neutral, professional, technocratic, as in the new governments in Greece and Italy, you are watching politics happen, class politics. And it is not happening either as a result of impersonal, diffuse market forces, but because there are organized class forces making it happen.

My wife recently came to this conclusion independently as she learned watching the news here in Italy where we live, that Italy will now be required (passive tense, already a literary preference for style in the Italian language is very well suited to the process of global governance, since in governance, unlike in government, no one appears to be governing – all the better for those that are) to change its constitution to require municipalities and the national state to balance their budget. Such a legal change is appalling for several reasons, among which are that the Italian constitution is the result of the Resistance movement that liberated the country from the Nazis and Fascists, and changing it because of outside pressure is shocking to many. Second, because any such requirement of a balanced budget essentially outlaws Keynesian economics and most social democratic and leftist politics by definition. Whether one likes or does not like such policies, banning one side in a political debate from enacting its own policies and requiring only one set of opposed policies is to thoroughly supplant exactly what a democratic debate and elections are meant to decide.

But my wife Silvia cut straight to the chase, to the heart of the matter one split-second after hearing the news: “That is the same thing the right wanted in the US when they were debating the Debt Ceiling” she told me. “This is a precisely-formulated program!” That is, she had exactly identified the main point in world politics today: who the main actors are. C.Wright Mills would not have put it better – a few whose ability to shape history far outweighs that of most of the rest of us put together. He called the ones he studied the Power Elite, I call the ones we face today a global ruling class and the institutional framework through which they act Global Governance. They’ve evolved since Mills’ time in other words.

But there is one more lesson: Politics, OUR politics, is also represented as economics. This is hard for activists to see since it sometimes requires both reading hieroglyphics such as market quotations, or interest rates, that at first sight appear to be unrelated to strikes, struggles, occupations and protests, even elections, and even boring to those of us who have avoided working in banking or Wall St. because this stuff did not seem the stuff of dreams to us. Also because it requires understanding that the results of our struggles sometimes leap up several levels of mediation.

Thus, on October 22, during the waning days of Jean-Claude Trichet’s tenure at head of the ECB, it was announced by Trichet, Sarkozy and Merkel that the banks would have to take a 50% haircut on their loans to Greece to save the Eurozone. This came just a couple of days after the largest, most disruptive strikes and protests to that time in Athens during the entire year and half of agony that has attended Greece’s debt crisis/class war, which is saying something, and after 100,000 had marched in Rome with much of the city involving clashes with police, on the eve of the already in the works Italian crisis. The ruling class had taken a step back from the abyss, writing down the Greek debts, as a revolution in Greece, the country’s withdrawal from the Euro and the Euro’s collapse were not the results desired, since the whole point was to use the Euro to force Greece to transfer wealth from its working population to global finance, not to have the whole debt cancelled and the measure of wealth in European banks reduced to paper.

Similarly, yesterday’s (Nov. 23) fiasco of German bonds, and the news that a Eurobond of some kind now appears inevitable are highly mediated but unmistakable results of the struggle as well. It has proven impossible to defend German finance while waging the class war on so many fronts in Southern Europe and while the students in Italy whose occupations as the “draghi ribelli” (rebel dragons but a play on the surname of the ECB head) and Greek and Portugese strikers and protesters will undoubtedly be made to pay later with more downgrades, more austerity proposals and the rest, they should be aware that their struggles in the streets, plazas and piazzas are not without effect.

For in the end, the real lesson is that economic minutia measure class struggle, and our struggle therefore has an impact on the system as a whole, its profitability, its flows of investment, its institutional stability. This is the trump card of political struggle, from Tahrir Square to the occupations across the US, to the strikes coming up in the UK, Greece and elsewhere in the next week or so, we can rest assured that the cracks in their seemingly technocratic edifice, in their stock quotations, bond ratings and profit rates are determined by our movements in the final analysis.

In Some States, Working Poor Could Pay More Taxes

Tuesday, April 12, 2011 by National Public Radio
by Pam Fessler

Several states want to scale back or eliminate a tax credit for the working poor, as they try to balance their budgets. Anti-poverty groups say some of these same states also want to cut taxes for businesses.

Governors say they're trying to balance the need to promote jobs with deficit reduction. But advocates say the poor are being asked to bear an unfair share of the burden.

The tax break is called an earned income tax credit, or EITC. About half the states offer residents an EITC on top of a similar credit available from the federal government.

Ramona Spencer is a single mother of five who lives in Lansing, Mich. The state's Republican governor, Rick Snyder, has proposed eliminating the Michigan EITC, which is 20 percent of the federal credit.

"Four hundred dollars may not seem like a lot to a lot of people," Spencer says. "But when you are already living on the bottom rung of society, you feel the difference."

Spencer says she used the credit last year to buy glasses for her disabled adult son, whom she cares for. She's worried about what she'll do if the state Legislature agrees to the governor's proposal.

"My son would either have to go without the glasses, or we would forgo doing other things. We would literally not have the gas to go or maybe not be able to pay one of our utilities," Spencer says.

Four hundred dollars may not seem like a lot to a lot of people. But when you are already living on the bottom rung of society, you feel the difference.
- Ramona Spencer, Michigan mother of five

But in some ways, Michigan is in the same boat as Spencer. Money is tight. The state faces a $1.8 billion deficit, and Snyder says eliminating the state EITC would save $340 million.

"We're in a severe budget situation, and when you looked at the priorities of what we could do, my view is let's help people on the very front end, on the safety net feature, and work hard to make sure we're keeping those programs in place, " he recently told reporters.

Snyder says his budget would preserve other safety-net spending, such as state Medicaid and welfare.

But anti-poverty advocates note that Snyder's budget also would cut business taxes by $1.8 billion.

"How does this make sense in terms of shared sacrifice?" asks Gilda Jacobs, CEO of the Michigan League for Human Services.

Jacobs says eliminating the state EITC will push 14,000 Michigan children into poverty. And, she says, it will hurt the local economy because the poor tend to quickly spend the money they get on things such as housing and food.

"The people that receive the EITC, they don't pay high expensive lobbyists, so they're easy pickings," she says.

But Snyder says it's really about creating jobs in a state with severe unemployment.

Other states are also targeting the EITC. Scott Walker, Wisconsin's Republican governor, hopes to save $41 million by revising his state's credit for the working poor. And New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, also a Republican, last year proposed a cut in his state's EITC, and the Legislature adopted the change. Lawmakers in Kansas and North Carolina are looking at similar proposals.

Nick Johnson of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, D.C., says it's odd because the EITC has long been favored by both Democrats and Republicans as an effective anti-poverty tool. One reason is that it goes only to people who work.

"We're not necessarily talking about the very poorest of the poor," Johnson says. "We're talking about working families who are trying to stay off of welfare, trying to avoid turning to the state for other kinds of help."

But the credit has drawn criticism from fiscal conservatives, in part because it's refundable. That means people can still get it, even if they don't owe taxes because their incomes are so low.

"Actually, it's a transfer payment is what it is," says Michael LaFaive with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan-based think tank. "In order for them to spend this money, it first has to be taken from other people and business. So these transfer payments just effectively rob very productive people and shift it to lower-income individuals."

LaFaive thinks the best way to fight poverty is with a healthy economy and the best way to get that is to let individuals and businesses keep the money they earn.

Spencer, who earns $13,000 a year teaching kids nutrition and gardening, takes issue with any suggestion that she's getting a handout. She says she's received direct government aid in the past and knows what that's like.

"That part is humiliating. Being able to get a credit is not. I feel like I've earned that, and I'm entitled to it. It is not a poverty handout," she says.

Spencer just hopes the tax credit sticks around long enough that she can keep getting it until she's able to earn enough money that she no longer needs any help at all.

Future of America's Working Class

THE FUTURE OF AMERICA'S WORKING CLASS
by Joel Kotkin 06/01/2010

Watford, England, sits at the end of a spur on the London tube's Metropolitan line, a somewhat dreary city of some 80,000 rising amid the pleasant green Hertfordshire countryside. Although not utterly destitute like parts of south or east London, its shabby High Street reflects a now-diminished British dream of class mobility. It also stands as a potential warning to the U.S., where working-class, blue-collar white Americans have been among the biggest losers in the country's deep, persistent recession.

As you walk through Watford, midday drinkers linger outside the One Bell pub near the center of town. Many of these might be considered "yobs," a term applied to youthful, largely white, working-class youths, many of whom work only occasionally or not at all. In the British press yobs are frequently linked to petty crime and violent behavior--including a recent stabbing outside another Watford pub, and soccer-related hooliganism.

In Britain alcoholism among the disaffected youth has reached epidemic proportions. Britain now suffers among the highest rates of alcohol consumption in the advanced industrial world, and unlike in most countries, boozing is on the upswing.

Some in the media, particularly on the left, decry unflattering descriptions of Britain's young white working class as "demonizing a whole generation." But many others see yobism as the natural product of decades of neglect from the country's three main political parties.

In Britain today white, working-class children now seem to do worse in school than immigrants. A 2003 Home Office study found white men more likely to admit breaking the law than racial minorities; they are also more likely to take dangerous drugs. London School of Economics scholar Dick Hobbs, who grew in a hardscabble section of east London, traces yobism in large part to the decline of blue-collar opportunities throughout Britain. "The social capital that was there went [away]," he suggests. "And so did the power of the labor force. People lost their confidence and never got it back."

Over the past decade, job gains in Britain, like those in the United States, have been concentrated at the top and bottom of the wage profile. The growth in real earnings for blue-collar professions--industry, warehousing and construction--have generally lagged those of white-collar workers.

Tony Blair's "cool Britannia,"epitomized by hedge fund managers, Russian oligarchs and media stars, offered little to the working and middle classes. Despite its proletarian roots, New Labour, as London Mayor Boris Johnson acidly notes, has presided over that which has become the most socially immobile society in Europe.

This occurred despite a huge expansion of Britain's welfare state, which now accounts for nearly one-third of government spending. For one thing the expansion of the welfare state apparatus may have done more for high-skilled professionals, who ended up nearly twice as likely to benefit from public employment than the average worker. Nearly one-fifth of young people ages 16 to 24 were out of education, work or training in 1997; after a decade of economic growth that proportion remained the same.

Some people, such as The Times' Camilla Cavendish, even blame the expanding welfare state for helping to create an overlooked generation of "useless, jobless men--the social blight of our age." These males generally do not include immigrants, who by some estimates took more than 70% of the jobs created between 1997 and 2007 in the U.K.

Immigrants, notes Steve Norris, a former member of Parliament from northeastern London and onetime chairman of the Conservative Party, tend to be more economically active than working-class white Britons, who often fear employment might cut into their benefits. "It is mainly U.K. citizens who sit at home watching daytime television complaining about immigrants doing their jobs," asserts Norris, a native of Liverpool.

The results can be seen in places like Watford and throughout large, unfashionable swaths of Essex, south and east London, as well as in perpetually depressed Scotland, the Midlands and north country. Rising housing prices, driven in part by "green" restrictions on new suburban developments, have further depressed the prospects for upward mobility. The gap between the average London house and the ability of a Londoner to afford it now stands among the highest in the advanced world.

Indeed, according to the most recent survey by demographia.com, it takes nearly 7.1 years at the median income to afford a median family home in greater London. Prices in the inner-ring communities often are even higher. According to estimates by the Centre for Social Justice, unaffordability for first-time London home buyers doubled between 1997 and 2007. This has led to a surge in waiting lists for "social housing"; soon there are expected by to be some 2 million households--5 million people--on the waiting list for such housing.

With better-paid jobs disappearing and the prospects for home ownership diminished, the traditional culture of hard work has been replaced increasingly by what Dick Hobbs describes as the "violent potential and instrumental physicality." Urban progress, he notes, has been confused with the apparent vitality of a rollicking night scene: "There are parts of London where the pubs are the only economy."

London, notes the LSE's Tony Travers, is becoming "a First World core surrounded by what seems to be going from a second to a Third World population." This bifurcation appears to be a reversion back to the class conflicts that initially drove so many to traditionally more mobile societies, such as the U.S., Australia and Canada.

Over the past decade, according to a survey by IPSOS Mori, the percentage of people who identify with a particular class has grown from 31% to 38%. Looking into the future, IPSOS Mori concludes, "social class may become more rather than less salient to people's future."

Britain's present situation should represent a warning about America's future as well. Of course there have always been pockets of white poverty in the U.S., particularly in places like Appalachia, but generally the country has been shaped by a belief in class mobility.

But the current recession, and the lack of effective political response addressing the working class' needs, threatens to reverse this trend.

More recently middle- and working-class family incomes, stagnant since the 1970s, have been further depressed by a downturn that has been particularly brutal to the warehousing, construction and manufacturing economies. White unemployment has now edged to 9%, higher among those with less than a college education. And poverty is actually rising among whites more rapidly than among blacks, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

You can see the repeat here of some of the factors paralleling the development of British yobism: longer-term unemployment; the growing threat of meth labs in hard-hit cities and small towns; and, most particularly, a 20% unemployment rate for workers under age 25. Amazingly barely one in three white teenagers, according to a recent Hamilton College poll, thinks his standard of living will be better than his parents'.

It's no surprise then that Democrats are losing support among working-class whites, much like the now-destitute British Labour Party. But the potential yobization of the American working class represents far more than a political issue. It threatens the very essence of what has made the U.S. unique and different from its mother country.