Posts this morning have featured the news that CorpoRat CEOs of the "Business Roundtable" are lobbying the White House heavily to make serious cutbacks in "entitlement" sending, including Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs.
Even a cursory consideration of these demands--for such is what they are--reveals the strategy behind them: to INCREASE workers' insecurities.
"Economic INsecurity" is the touchstone, the holy grail, for ALL bosses in ALL industries.
Not desolation. Just that nagging, inescapable, dread fear that you might be unemployed tomorrow. What would you do? Bosses LOVE it when workers feel that way. It makes the workers compliant, and unresisting, and more easily exploitable: "What, you don't want to work the Holiday? Okay. I can find somebody who does. What? Overtime? Really?? Hahaha..."
It has long been an article of faith that there should never A certain level of "structural unemployment" (formerly about 4%; now u to around 7%) is the "ideal" for employers. It offers them a pool of unemployed to point to, so as to diminish complaints from abused workers about their conditions. With such a large pool of unemployed, the message is incontrovertible: work for what I will pay you, doing WHAT I tell you, or be replaced.
Revolutions happen when people have nothing to lose. The genius of 'capitalism' has been to make sure the workers always have SOMETHING to lose, because when you've got ANYTHING, you have EVERYTHING to lose. Even if you only "have it" on credit.
SO they gotta be nervous, worried, apprehensive, and willing to do ANYTHING to keep their jobs.
FDR was NOT a "liberal."
He was a wealthy patrician with a well-developed sense of noblesse oblige, and the sense to recognize that the proles were on the verge of out-right revolt which would have cost his class dearly. He SAVED capitalism!