THE BERNHARD PERSPECTIVE
The T**** administration has attempted to reassure consumers facing ongoing inflation with a chilling talking point: Poverty is good, actually. This is a tacit admission that they know their policies will make us poorer and make life harder for the working classes in America. But then, they don’t care. Their message comes down to this: suck it up and get back to work
Preaching T****’s gospel, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has made the astonishing assertion that being able to afford things is not important to Americans. To quote the Secretary, “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.”
T**** affirmed Bessent’s vision when he told reporters in April that he’s not worried about empty stores or children going without toys for Christmas. In truth, T**** is priming Americans for accepting a drastically lower standard of living.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick further defined this vision in an interview with CNBC in May: multiple generations working in the same factories, stuck in the same grueling jobs for low pay.
Says Lutnick, “This is the new model, where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work there. It’s time to train people not to do the jobs of the past but to do the great jobs of the future.”
Great jobs of the future? For Lutnck, toiling away year after year, generation after generation in a factory is the best America can offer its working class? That’s the best we can look forward to? Who’s kidding whom?
Republicans are clearly not worried about telling us that not only is relief not coming, but you shouldn’t complain about it. However, the idea that there’s no chance for upward mobility and that generations of Americans will be bound to the same oligarch, capitalist bosses sounds suspiciously like feudalism.
Although you cannot assume that Lutnick knows it, his model of course, is not new. It is the child of the Industrial revolution, which spans the years from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries. It’s heartless, uncaring and impersonal horrors were minutely dissected in Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” published in 1905.
This, then, is Donald T****’s vision of the American dream: a regression of over a hundred years to the days when men, women and children worked grueling hours in factories at little more than existence wages.
The die would be cast at birth by caste. The ruling class would live apart in regal splendor. But there would be few paths up or out of T****’s and Lutnick’s imposed feudal existence and planned impoverishment for the working class.
And you can just forget about toys for your children at Christmas.
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