Immigration And Class Warfare
05/21/2007
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Martin Hutchinson, who did an article for us once, has a Bears Lair column on immigration and it's effect on the relatively classless society that has evolved in the US.

The immigration bill brought forward and apparently likely to pass demonstrates an unattractive new political trend in the United States: the end of the classless society for which the U.S. has been famous and the opening of yawning political as well as economic gaps between rich and poor. Traditionally, the United States has been economically unequal, but without a sharp divide between rich and poor in the political arena. Democrats represented the South, minorities and unionized labor, while Republicans represented small business and the professional classes. The truly rich have always been more or less evenly divided between the parties. Thus, except for a brief period in 1932-46, the U.S. never had a real class-based politics. One economic force was always likely to change this; the steady increase in inequality seen in the United States since about 1969.

[The end of the classless society, PrudentBear.com, May 21, 2007]

He compares the situation to the situation in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, :

H.G. Wells postulated in his 1895 ”Time Machine” the ultimate destination of a Latin American—style social system. In his future 800,000 years hence the human race has divided into two species, the eloi, who do no work and live only for trivial aesthetic pleasures and the morlocks, sub-men who work underground keeping the mechanical civilization running. Wells’s fantasy seemed far-fetched after 1920, as equality increased and the working classes became both educated and comfortably off. However the fantasy looks a lot closer to reality in 2007 than it did in 1957, when the movie was made.

Read the whole thing.

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