We surely seem to be living in conservative times — with the NDP trying to distance itself from all things socialist and the public apparently unable to sate its appetite for all things royal.Go read the whole article.
Certainly it’s easy to get the impression from the media that Canadians, content with their capitalist bounty, are primarily focused on the activities and outfits of the Royal Family.
So perhaps it’s out-of-sync with the times to suggest that we’re actually in the middle of a class war, and that it’s been heating up lately.
Of course, the genius of the architects of today’s conservative revolution has been to obscure the class war they’ve been quietly waging, keeping us distracted with foreign military ventures, royals and other celebrity sightings.
Behind all these diversions, the class war has been relentlessly proceeding. While incomes at the top have steadily climbed, incomes of ordinary Canadians have steadily eroded. The real median Canadian family income hasn’t risen since the late 1970s — even though today’s typical family now has two earners, compared to just one earner 30 years ago. In other words, Canadian families are working about twice as hard to keep up to where they were a generation ago.
If you had told me when I was a kid I would watch generation after generation being forced to work harder for less I would have thought you were crazy. I was raised on the idea that each generation would live a better lifestyle because of productivity improvements. I watched my father work a 6 day week and then a five. I worked a 5 day 40 hour week and watched my brother get a 32.5 hour work week in the early 1980s. But that was the high water mark. It has been concessions and slower wage increases. I watched myself in the late 1980s through until I quit work a couple of years ago continue to get salary increases less than inflation while my employer wrote glowing performance reports and gave me little trinkets in company meetings telling me how wonderful I was (but not wonderful enough to actually stay ahead of inflation).
I can look at productivity numbers. A single worker today should be paid more than the rare two income family of the 1960s, but they aren't. Here are US Bureau of Labor Statistics:
I did a quick and dirty spreadsheet. With the above statistics, a single person today should be earning what 2.7 people were earning in 1962 and 4.2 people in 1947. I remember my parent's generation (born in early 1920s fought WWII) were reasonably well off in the 1950s and 1960s raising a family of 3 kids with new cars every 4 or 5 years and new houses roughly every 10 years. I lived a lifestyle nowhere near that and I look at my brother's kids and they aren't living a lifestyle as well as my generation. I've seen 40 years of worsening economic conditions for families, the same 40 years that the political right has been rampant, has destroyed unions, and promised "trickle down" economics while celebrating "lifestyles of the rich and famous".
I wonder when the electorate is going to wake up and realize that they have re-installed the chasm in wealth between working and rich that was the hallmark of the gilded era. I'm expected the ultra-rich to bring back the big mansions with staffs of 20 or more all decked out in monkey suits bowing and scraping to give the rich an ego boost and they lord it over their personal slaves... uh, "servants".
I'm bitter because this wasn't the social contract I was born under. The future has been stolen by the ultra-rich. I'll be dead in 20 years, so it won't matter to me anymore, and I'm past my working years so I'm not demanding wage increases, but I'm demanding a better deal for the working adults today and certainly a much better deal for the kids today. This backsliding can't continue. It will lead to a social explosion and heads will roll. The rich are just stupid enough to not realize they are digging their own graves with their rampant greed.
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