So, TPP Fast Track has passed. RIP American Middle Class [View all]

[hifiguy]

Here lies the American Middle Class. 1920-2015.

The Middle Class succumbed to a prolonged illness after ailing in recent years. The Middle Class began to develop in the United Sttes following the end of World War I, though it was set back badly by the Great Depression, brought on by bankers, speculation and Republican economics. Franklin D. Roosevelt laid the foundations of the Great Middle Class Revival, though he did not live to see it. Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower presided over the vast expansion of the Middle Class and helped to entrench it as one of the great achievements of the US. John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson continued to expand upon policies which had been so beneficial to the Middle Class.

In 1981 under President Ronald Raygun, the Middle Class came under its first real assault after a decade of benign neglect. The assault intensified under GHW Bush, Bill Clinton, and GW Bush, all of whom helped to undermine the Middle Class while serving the One Percenters and, especially, the tenth-percenters and hundredth-percenters; their fortunes had to be built and entrenched, whatever the cost to the Middle Class.

Fate and cosmic irony left it to an ostensibly "liberal" Democratic president, Barack Obama, to finally deal the death blow to the Middle Class, once again under the bogus rubric of free trade, more properly known as "freedom for capital to do whatever it wants to whomever it wants, with no consequences to be paid whatsoever."

Memorials for the Middle Class should be sent to The Clinton Foundation, the Third Way, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup. They will love the irony.