Monday 10th of February 2025

a honest day's work........

The middle-class is the mainstay of most human modern societies… it does not mind being ruled by whoever — democratic lunacy, despots, psychopathic decrees, tyrants, dictators and authoritarians — as long as the honest people of the honest middle-class can make a honest buck from a honest day of honest hard work. If the illusion of honesty unravels then the whole edifice of social cohesion, even peppered with amusing diversity, will collapse… Peace at home is often achieved by the rest of the world being on fire, but this is the honest privilege of ignorance of where moneys come from. 

The rulers have their armies sent to plunder and ransack and rape the world, while the middle-class is whitewashed by their clarions, religious and mediatic, claiming the filtered righteousness of the mess that eventually percolates to the honest people of the honest middle-class doing a honest day of honest hard work…

The middle-class relies on poetic and romantic ignorance of the trees being felled to make its beautiful furniture items. As well, the middle-class relies on borrowings (serviceable debt) to finance the honest lifestyle....

There is an ultimate proportion of middle-classers versus the lower-class and the upper class, though depending on circumstances, the fluidity of the middle-class is upwardly or downwardly mobile. the middle-class provides most of the TAX REVENUES…. On this score, governments love the middle-class...

We, the Gus of this world, are middle-class jokers, troubadours and Voltairian activists that provide the songs and narratives predicting the death of the middle-class that never dies.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

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A DEFINITION:

What Is the Middle Class? 

The middle class is a socioeconomic category used to describe people and families with incomes that fall into the median range for the geographic area they live in. The definition is not precise, but generally, middle-class people in the United States viewed as having sufficient means to live a comfortable lifestyle:

 
  • Are white-collar professionals or run their own businesses
  • Tend to have college degrees
  • May own their own homes
  • Have adequate health insurance
  • Have some disposable income after all basic needs are met
  • Are saving toward retirement

In the U.S., people and households are often categorized as working class, middle class, or upper class. Calculations vary widely, but more than half of Americans are usually classified as middle class.

Pew Research Center. “Are You in the American Middle Class? Find Out with Our Income Calculator.”

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS
  • The middle class is a socioeconomic strata that falls in between the working class and the upper class.
  • The middle class constitutes about half of the U.S. population, but it has shrunk over nearly half a century.
  • Those in the middle class have enough disposable income to afford minor luxuries like vacations or restaurants but rely on borrowing for big-ticket items like homes and cars.
The Mid-Level Caste

In India’s traditional caste system, the mid-level caste was made up of farmers, traders, and merchants. The lowest caste designation, that of the “untouchables,” was abolished in 1950.

Understanding the Term "Middle Class" 

The well-being of the middle class is a powerful motivator in American politics, and policies addressing their economic welfare are a cornerstone of political debate. 

Today’s middle-class families tend to own their own homes (although with a mortgage), own a car (with a loan or lease), send their kids to college (although with student loans or scholarships), are saving to retire, and have enough disposable income to enjoy some luxuries like dining out and vacations.

 https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/middle-class.asp 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

SEE ALSO: 

we have advanced our backward thinking with critical supply of nuko-warthingies....

deep state agent......

Antony Blinken spent his last two weeks in office giving media interviews defending his record as America’s top ‘diplomat’. But it was under Blinken’s watch that the US sparked the worst security crisis in Europe since WWII, and fueled the most severe fighting between Jews and Palestinians since Israel’s creation in 1948. Let’s review his legacy.

The New York Times revealed over the weekend that Blinken rejected a proposal in late 2022 by Joint Chiefs chairman Milley to push for peace talks in Ukraine, and argued with generals in favor of sending more advanced weapons to Kiev.

Blinken was one of the main architects of the Ukraine conflict – which could have been stopped in the spring of 2022, or averted entirely if the Biden administration didn’t pigheadedly insist on NATO membership for Ukraine, which Russia warned was its red line.

In late 2021, as Kiev amassed troops near the Donbass, prompting mirror moves from Moscow, Blinken spoke to Ukraine’s foreign minister to assure him of NATO’s “unwavering commitment.”

Months later, after fighting began, Blinken's State Department joined with other Biden administration agencies and the Pentagon in supporting the Ukrainian crisis's escalation into a full-blown NATO proxy war against Russia, complete with hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid to Kiev, CIA and military advisors and foreign mercenaries engaged in the conflict zone and operating advanced Western NATO weapons systems, and intelligence support.

The Kiev regime “threw [the peace deal] into the dustbin of history,” President Putin said in mid-2023, confirming then long-running reports that Moscow and Kiev were on the verge of a deal after talks in Belarus and Istanbul, Turkiye weeks into the conflict before NATO's intervention to kill it.

 

Gaza Bloodbath

In October 2023, in response to a surprise Hamas-led incursion into Gaza, Israel launched its deadliest-ever attack on Palestinians in Gaza.

“We will always be there by your side,” Blinken vowed, standing in Tel Aviv alongside Prime Minister Netanyahu just days after the war began.

He was true to his word. From late 2023 and mid-2024 alone, the US sent Israel 14,000+ MK-84 2,000-pound bombs, 6,500 500-pound bombs, and an array of other munitions.

The same month, a rights monitor calculated that Israel had dropped over 70,000 tons of bombs on the 365 km2 Strip, more than the combined tonnage dropped on Dresden, Hamburg and London in all of WWII.

Blinken could have pressured his boss to turn off the taps on arms for Israel, which would have ended fighting in weeks. Instead, the State Department spent fifteen months talking about peace talks (which were actually spearheaded by other countries) as Gaza burned.

 

War Worldwide, Inc.

Besides Ukraine and Gaza, whose combined death toll is now in the hundreds of thousands, Blinken has led or signed off on an array of other escalatory and aggressive US foreign policy decisions.

 

Wrecking Trump’s face-to-face diplomacy-based efforts to improve ties between the US and North Korea within weeks after Biden's inauguration in 2021, Blinken’s State Department negotiated a new tripartite security pact with South Korea and Japan aimed squarely against Pyongyang.

 

Fueling tensions in the East and South China Sea against China, Blinken escalated US bilateral alliance-based efforts to hem China into its home shores using the classic ‘island chain strategy’, vowed to ramp up support for Taiwan, and negotiated the anti-Beijing AUKUS security pact between the US, the UK and Australia.

 

Ramping up the confrontation against Iran and its Axis of Resistance allies, the US provided support to Tel Aviv during the back-to-back Iran-Israel missile and airstrikes, launched an air and naval campaign against Yemen’s Houthis, and facilitated the continuation of the long-running dirty war in Syria, culminating in the toppling of the Assad government in late 2024.

 

Blinken’s State Department was instrumental in US involvement in burning conflicts across Africa, from Ethiopia and Libya to the Sahel, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

 

It also continued the tradition of low-key US efforts to institute regime change in countries perceived as disloyal to US interests, from Nicaragua and Bangladesh to Serbia and Georgia.

Blinken’s record, while ruthless, isn’t surprising, given his active support as he rose through the ranks in his diplomatic career for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the 2011 NATO aerial assault on Libya, which turned that country into a failed state, and the start of the war against Syria in 2011.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20250120/secretary-of-forever-wars-antony-blinkens-blood-soaked-legacy-1121472986.html

 

SEE ALSO: https://sputnikglobe.com/20250113/blinken-exploited-bidens-senility-and-brought-us-to-brink-of-nuclear-war--scott-ritter-1121418995.html

 

SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/53946

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SINS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

 

MOST OF THE MIDDLE-CLASS LIKED BLINKEN FOR HE PROVIDED THE ILLUSIONS NECESSARY FOR THE "PEACE AT HOME" SYNDROME...

climate and class....

 

Sarah Glynn & John Clarke – “Climate Change is a Class Issue”     Originally published: Resolute Reader Blog

 

In January 2024, the World Economic Forum predicted that by 2050 climate change will cause 14.5 million deaths and $12.5 trillion in damage. In addition there will be billions of people injured, made sick, and displaced by floods, heatwaves and weather crises of all types. The vast majority of these people will be poor—both in the Global South and the developed world. A significant number of them will be working people.

The centrality of workers, and the working class, to the question of climate change and its impacts is frequently ignored or downplayed. It is important then, that some writers and activists take the question of class seriously in their analyses of the environment threat. Here in the UK I, for instance, with many other trade union and climate activists have participated in the Million Climate Jobreports which discuss the role of trade unions in creating sustainable jobs and the fight for a climate service to manage a Just Transition.

Activists Sarah Glynn and John Clarke’s important new book places the question of class, specifically the working class, central to its manifesto for an alternative strategy to the climate crisis. In its introduction they emphasise how workers, and their class, are not privileged in their discussion because of their increased likelihood of being victims, nor the disproportionate impact of their lives on the environment compared to the wealthy, but “because the system that exploits the planet to destruction is the same that depends on class exploitation: the system that sees everything in terms of profit—which is what capitalism is.”

As an exploited class, whose labour is central to the production process that powers capitalism, workers have the most powerful position in society when it comes to winning and enacting change.

This change, the authors argue, must be revolutionary. Capitalism has proven itself unable to enact real change. It is not able to confront the centrality of fossil fuels and the short-termism inherent to production driven by competitive accumulation. The authors write:

Survival demands revolutionary change to the economy, and the backbone of the economy is its workers. When workers take action together, including planned and strategic withdrawal of their labour, they have the power to make continuation with existing practices impossible: the power to force change. They also have knowledge and skills that can be turned towards creating a different way of doing things.

This is a crucial understanding. Workers’ power is not just in their ability to stop the economy. But also in their ability to conceive and construct alternatives to the status quo. Indeed I would go further. The struggles of workers, even the shortest strike, prefigure a new way of organising society as they demonstrate the ability of workers’ to control and organise their own way. The heights of revolution, as I have written elsewhere, show this a million times more as workers create new institutions of workers’ power to lead their struggles and organise their world.

Drawing on recent work by John Bellamy Foster, the authors suggest a strategy to go forward:

Foster’s book puts forward the notion of an initial ‘ecodemocratic phase’ in the struggle that would ‘demand a world of sustainable human development.’ This would then go over to a ‘more decisive, ecosocialist phase of the revolutionary struggle’. Taking this perspective as a starting point, we can consider how we might organise and what our goals might be as the scale and intensity of the climate disaster intensifies.

They continue:

We must develop and apply the forms of mass action that can lead to the curtailing of emissions and the transition to renewable energy sources. In this regard, we are hardly starting from nowhere because a vital struggle for climate justice is already well and truly underway.

This is, obviously true. Socialists have frequently been caricatured, and often for good reason, as suggesting that humanity must “wait for the revolution” before solving environmental crisis. As Glynn and Clarke point out, there are crucial immediate struggles to be fought over mitigation and to reduce emissions. These must be fought for. But the danger I think is that we see to great a delineation between the two “phases” as suggested by Foster. The first will likely flow over into the second, and indeed contain elements of the second as the struggle ebbs and flows. Building workers’ power organizationally and economically is a process, not a defined series of steps.

In addition the struggles that workers will need to engage in, may not be just over climate issues. Workers’ fighting to defend climate refugees from state racism, striking to defend jobs (even in fossil fuel industries) or protesting against austerity are engaging in a struggle that will increase their confidence to resist and fight over wider and bigger issues—including climate justice.

The importance of Glynn and Clarke’s analysis is, however, to argue that workers are the agency of change: “Workers are not victims needing protection, as portrayed in some writing about the ‘green transition’. They are subjects who can and must play a proactive role in building a genuinely sustainable future.” This is an analysis lost on too many in the environmental movement who when faced with the power of the capitalist state lack an understanding of the force to challenge that.

This brings me to a couple of minor criticisms of Climate Change is a Class Issue. While the authors’ depict a democratic and sustainable post-capitalist future I felt the book lacked any link between the struggles of today, and the revolutionary overturn of society. A couple of paragraphs that linked struggle today, with the process of workers’ struggle creating revolutionary institutions that form the basis of a socialist society that can enact the fundamental changes needed would have been helpful. A couple of lines on the state as a barrier to this transition and workers’ power as the strength to challenge it would have been helpful.

I also thought the authors’ formulation of nature as being “exploited” by capitalism unhelpful. For Marxists “exploitation” has as specific meaning, that refers to the way that workers under capitalism sell their labour power to enable the bosses to extract surplus value. This is not the way capitalist production relates to nature. The authors argue,

Capitalism exploits nature in the same way that capitalism exploits the working class. How both are treated depends only on their potential to make money.

It is true that natural resources are embedded within the capitalist production process, but this is only in as much as they are tied to the capital-worker relationship. This is not Marxist nit-picking, but important if we are to understand precisely why workers do have the power to overthrow capitalism.

These minor criticisms aside, I cannot help but agree with the authors’ conclusion:

The class struggle that we take up must be based on an active solidarity for survival and the goal of a rational and just society. In the face of the existential crisis that we are now confronting, there is simply no other way forward.

Activists in the socialist, trade union and environmental movement would do well to get hold of a copy of this short book and read and discuss it. It’s freely available for download at the authors’ website here.

https://mronline.org/2025/01/20/sarah-glynn-john-clarke-climate-change-is-a-class-issue/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.