A Couple Of My Favorite Themes

 A number of times in my posts I have proffered the belief that  Ol' Mitch and the Boys have only one real objective.

In fact it is at a high enough level of simple completeness that it can legitimately and accurately be called a strategy.

That strategy is that Ol' Mitch and the boys want to return most of us as soon as possible to being serfs.

Any good strategy is supported by tactics.

The most recent tactic in support of serfdom for all is the rolling cancellation across the United States of Red of enhanced unemployment benefits.

This tactic is being supported by the bogus assertion - at least as well documented as the assertion that the 2020 election was stolen - that Americans are living the life of Riley (real old allusion) and won't go back to work.

The fact that many of those Americans can't go back to work because the pandemic has closed schools so the kids are home and need to be cared for, or that most child care facilities are closed because of the pandemic, or because many of those Americans have health conditions that make going back to work just now to be tantamount to a death sentence is not ever mentioned by Ol' Mitch and the Boys.

They say that as long as Americans are getting a living wage for staying home they won't go back to work.

(The unintended irony that drips from that assertion is so hilariously funny - Americans need to give up a living wage so they can go back to work - that one would laugh uproariously if that actual assertion were not totally false and demeaningly dismissive of a large segment of the American population; it's a post Reagan version of the welfare queen.)

So state by state the republicans are giving their citizens a choice: lose your home or go to work for whatever some feudal lord's business plan allows for payroll - if indeed, payroll is even a line item in the business plan.

Sounds like serfdom to me.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. published a book called The Age of Jackson in the early 1940's.

That book was based on a series of lectures he had previously delivered at Harvard, his alma mater. (Cambridge being another).

In this book he said  "... since this is a capitalistic society, the class most interested in its security and prosperity is the capitalist class, which thus should have the most power. The theory has survived every test but experience. It simply has not worked. Since the Federalist party the American business community appears to have lost its political capacity; it has not been, in the strict sense, a ruling class. In placid days power naturally gravitates to it as the strongest group in the state; but through American history it has been unable to use that power very long for national purposes. Moved typically by personal and class, rarely by public, considerations, the business community has invariably brought national affairs to a state of crisis and exasperated the rest of society into dissatisfaction bordering on revolt. "

It looks to me as if Schlesinger is a prophet and that we are on the brink of dissatisfaction bordering on revolt.