And all the fine roundies gathered round!

It is interesting to note that the great White Star liner Titanic was built for the masses! There were three distinct classes aboard Titanic as there were in all British controlled capital ships of that time and they went in ships population in reverse order. First class always had the fewest passengers, followed by the second class, while the third class always had by far the most numbers aboard those that plied the north Atlantic passenger trade during the period of the great migrations from old Europe to the still relatively young United States.

The night that Titanic went down the greatest losses were among the third class passengers who were not even allowed on deck until after most of the inadequate number of lifeboats were already pulling away. After the great ship was gone, and as the movie by the same name so aptly pointed out, the remaining lifeboats sat there in a quiet sea awaiting a rescue that they were not really sure might come. These predominantly moderate to very rich souls only knew that they had been witness to a great disaster followed by the horrific screams that came from their dying mates as they faced the unyielding cold north Atlantic waters that they floated upon in their abundant life jackets that, as modern airliner crews know so well, were only there to help to identify and recover bodies after the fact.

Titanic has been symbolic of many things over the years since her foundering. Many state that her loss was the end of the gilded age, a time of great over abundance for some while the masses had basically nothing much at all. If Titanic’s loss did not end that time period, then the beginning of World War One certainly did end it as we saw, for the first time, the ultimate horrors of war put on display up to that time. Now, we live in an age that is becoming similar to that time leading up to the great war to end all wars that marked the first years of the twentieth century. We have the great billionaire robber barons who are using their influence over politicians to take away so many of the benefits for the masses that had made the twentieth century a time when the middle class was at its zenith. In some ways, right now, we are at the end of the great age when a worker could work his time and retire to a comfortable life financed by his pension when he still might have some spring in his garters. Those coming up behind look forward to a retirement that may be delayed perhaps unto death by the lack of adequate funds to retire the way that they would like to envision it. They are certainly not going to be able to retire the way so many of their parents did.

And then you have situations that have arisen such as what we have seen in the coal industry where a sham put together corporation such as the Patriot Coal company that exist only to go bankrupt so that the federal court system can approve the lowering of pension benefits for those that have worked hard in dangerous jobs for much of their adult lives. If we think the rest of corporate America is not going to follow the coal industry’s lead we have not been paying attention to what has happened with those corporations who have followed the lead of Apple Computers in creating schemes to avoid paying corporate income taxes that have been brought to light lately.

There is some psychological phenomena involved with depriving the masses of what they once had. As the children of the middle class look forward to having less than their parents did, particularly among the hard working classes, there may be a tendency not to place as much faith in the corporations that they work for and also to find ways to be less productive than they once were. It has been arguably stated for many years that the average American worker is the hardest working and most productive in the entire world. But that was when they had something to look forward to at the end of their working lives. When you have nothing to look forward to except more and more work followed by the reliance on social security and an inadequately funded 401K plan, increasingly, as time goes by, the tendency to slough off or simply sabotage the workplace may be on the rise in America. With the rise of the computer age, sabotage can be so easily done!

It is coming more and more to light what the Republican party is doing and who they are really representing as they go about their daily business in the nations capitals--Washington and the rest. The Republicans want, by 2032, to put an end to all of the social programs that were begun one hundred years before by the New Deal under Franking D. Roosevelt. This will leave the nation with a wealthy class sitting atop a world that existed before the great depression began. It will be a world that is populated by disposable workers who will be expected to go away and die as soon as they can no longer service the great monied classes. Among the things that the Republicans want to dispose of is Medicare and Medicaid, leaving the benefits of the great medical advances of the last fifty years solely to themselves. When one of the great symbols of the ruthless monied classes died recently--Larry Hagman as J.R. Ewing--he had lived for many years beyond his appointed time due to his ability to get an essential organ transplant that prolonged his life. The same can be said for the billionaire Steve Jobs. What we are beginning to see is a wealthy class using medical advances to pull away from the average working citizen who simply does not have the resources to buy the life extensions that the wealthy alone can afford. In point of fact, the average working person’s life span has not advanced since around the time that Ronald Wilson Reagan came into office in 1981. And there is ample evidence to believe that Reagan wanted it that way as he represented a group of very wealthy people who simply did not care for the average working person at all. They had been forced into giving the benefits that they did throughout the twentieth century and they took the first opportunity to stop doing that that they could contrive using their ample money to finance the growing political atmosphere that has fostered these declines.

Titanic was commemorated on the one hundredth anniversary of her sinking just last year and all of the lessons that we should have learned from her passage into history have seemingly been lost. Simple hard working immigrants were enticed aboard a ship for the princely sum of four hundred dollars in the hope of a passage to a new world and a new life and simply left at the mercy of the capitalist system that left them to freeze to death at sea as the ownership tried to prove that it could get them to their destinations as fast as anyone else available at the time. And, they are out to prove it again just a century later on a much greater scale than they have ever done before. Titanic was a great four stacker liner, the largest thing afloat in the world at that time. What came to rescue the survivors was a simple one stack liner called the Carpathia. This may be symbolic of the world that may await the rich after the collapse of the middle class. They will still have some of their wealth but, in their arrogance to have more and more and more, they will have lost a world that they probably never deserved to begin with.

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe