Upper Yours

Lately, the think tanks are opening a particular front in the class war.

Even though the screwing has taken place for 30 years, it's still pretty new that the receiving end has been so brilliantly dubbed
The 99 Percent. No matter how the public perceives the Occupy movement, what One Percent has accomplished is clear on such a visceral level that the Noise Machine's usual routines may not be enough to distract from the extremes of economic inequality.

Although racist dog whistle has long been successful in blaming the poor for being poor, now that so many of the formerly middle-class have joined the latter's ranks, the PR effort to deny that the poor even exist has been stepped up. As Roy Edroso points to it—

Remember that "Look, these so-called 'poor' have refrigerators" thing? In preparation for the Age of Mitt Romney, they're ramping that shit up. From the Washington Examiner:

As President Obama crafts a reelection income equality message aimed at punishing the rich and rewarding the poor, his own government finds that the 46 million living below the so-called "poverty line" live and spend pretty much like everyone else.

Forget the image of Appalachia or rundown ghettos: A collection of federal household consumption surveys collected by pollster Scott Rasmussen finds that 74 percent of the poor own a car or truck, 70 percent have a VCR, 64 percent have a DVD, 63 percent have cable or satellite, 53 percent have a video game system, 50 percent have a computer, 30 percent have two or more cars and 23 percent use TiVo.

...Here's the most damning evidence of all:

83 percent of the poor said they have enough to eat.

You want their sympathy? Show them some distended ribs!

The intended target, of course, isn't the poor, since no one in American politics cares about them. It's all those formerly or soon-to-be-formerly middle-class people who are with reason worried about becoming poor in this shitty economy.

And here's TBogg, on James Q. Wilson's pooh-poohing income inequality—

This is what is known as Three Card Monte For The Poors where Wilson uses misdirection lest we point at the card that, when flipped over, shows the rich guy who buys companies, overloads them with debt, takes massive management fees while stripping them of their assets, ships jobs overseas, and then bankrupts the company leaving the former employees to shift for themselves — unless, of course, they have a famous name and the connections that go along with that, in which case: it's all good.

Then there's Charles Murray's latest subsidized "scholarship," designed to propel the theme of the-poor-get-what-they-deserve beyond punditry and into conventional wisdom.

The Flying Fickle Finger of Genetic Determinism...

As if Murray's dreck wouldn't be promoted adequately in the mass media, David Brooks jumped to the head of the cheerleading squad.

Edroso—

A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN: Charles Murray and David Brooks:

I'll be shocked if there's another book this year as important as Charles Murray's "Coming Apart."

And it's important because it explains why the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor has nothing to do with capitalism.

TBogg: Brooks on Murray's "Oh Great. Now The Fucking White Trash Is Acting Like The Coloreds."

Charles Pierce on Brooks/Murray here.

Brooks' trope, in his own weaselly words—

... America has polarized. The word "class" doesn't even capture the divide Murray describes. You might say the country has bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking them.

...

It's wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It's wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites. The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive.

Since the country is divided into upper and lower tribes, Brooks and the rest can play on this idea of how we can't possibly do anything about the Lowers, who've made the choice to follow poor tribal behavior.

For public consumption, this will be accompanied by stage sighs about how unfortunate it is that the plight of the Lowers is unremediable.

Unfortunate? Actually: reminiscent. This campaign is a barely warmed up "underclass" leftover; with extra helping of genetic determinism—no longer only for the darkies.

After all, the pseudo-scientific concept of a permanent "underclass" was previously peddled in the 1980s—by none other than Charles Murray—

For Murray (1984), the responsibility for criminal involvement, children born out of wedlock, joblessness, and dependency on welfare rests upon the shoulders of members of the underclass themselves. The underclass reproduces its behavior from one generation to the next, just as it perpetually reproduces itself, through excessive unwanted births to teenage mothers and unemployed or unemployable fathers.

Ten years later, after The End of Welfare As We Know It, Murray took this tack—

... He feels that the underclass grew during the 1990s.... Murray's earlier concept of underclass as arising from poverty and the perverse incentives associated with welfare is later replaced with the concept of intergenerationally and genetically determined transmittal of poverty status. (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994). Murray's change in conceptualization of underclass helps him reconcile how the black underclass could grow even during a period of welfare retrenchment.

If I hadn't seen this until now, it comes as little surprise that there is a bit of "youthful excess" in Murray's past. Because, who could have known what cross-burning signifies?

Brooks' handsome pay means he will never know shame. But at least Driftglass can call him out his pretense of seriously adressing poverty, when—

... what comes out are a string of embarrassing noises assembled out of fragments of what he has heard people saying:

The essential truth about poverty is that we will never fully understand what causes it.

There are a million factors that contribute to poverty, and they interact in a zillion ways.

Driftglass again—

Of course one really good, battle-tested anti-poverty program on which most of the golden age of Murrican Values was built is known as a "good-paying job" with "security" and "strong labor protection" that provides "Americans" with a "future" towards which they can "plan" and in which they can have "faith". But for America's Leading Reasonable Conservative Public Intellectual it is neither fun nor safe to talk about that stuff (mostly because just beneath the surface of that conversation lurks the ever-present danger of accidentally mentioning the 30 years of Conservative economic policies which destroyed the golden age of Murrican Values.) Much easier for Mr. Brooks to lay down 800 words of faux badass rat-a-tat pop sociology jive about the po' that he picked up on the street.

Unfortunately the "street" on which Mr. Brooks picked up his urban blight slingo winds past the dull, dark, and melancholy House of Murray before cutting directly through beautiful, downtown Davos, and when he tries to sound like he knows what he is talking about all that shines through -- as bright and shiny as a new, fiat currency penny -- is his complete lack of any frame of personal reference:

Let's say there is a 14-year-old girl who, for perfectly understandable reasons, wants to experience the love and sense of purpose that go with motherhood, rather than stay in school in the hopes of someday earning a middle-class wage.

You have no idea what factors have caused her to make this decision, and you have no way of knowing what will dissuade her. But you want her, from morning until night, to be enveloped by a thick ecosystem of positive influences.

... since Mr. Brooks hasn't the slightest fucking clue about poverty, what comes out of his keyboard sounds as idiotic as Willard Romney talking about being unemployed, or Newt Gingrich talking about morality. And since Our Mr. Brooks definitely does not want to talk about the complete devastation 30 years of Conservatism has wreaked on the middle class, the working poor and America's manufacturing base, he instead opts to lazily extrude 800words of gabble-gabble nonsense out of the giant hole where his human experience ought to be.