The Malthusian States of America

With 20 million Americans' incomes plummeting by as much as two-thirds literally overnight with the expiration of federal unemployment benefits, and 40 million of us facing eviction in the coming months because we lack the money to pay the rent, and with a pandemic raging all around us, comparisons to such catastrophes as the Great Depression simply fail to suffice.

This is especially true because our government, ostensibly formed to protect the citizens, is now openly run by a cabal of corporate predators using "democratically" elected politicians as their front-men and front-women. We are, in effect, not so much a nation or a republic as we are a colony.

A more apt historical comparison to the present crisis might be 19th century Ireland, where mass famine was the de facto pandemic of the era.

Ireland, a British colony, suffered from extreme inequality. Most property was owned by absentee landlords. When the famine arrived in 1845, nearly a million people died and some eight million more were forced to emigrate. British elites simply delighted in the situation, much as Wall Street investors are delighting in Malthusian population control, via Covid-19. The soaring stock market indicates the euphoria of the elites every single day. The more people who die in service to the rich, the more their homes become vacant, the more that the profits of the wealthy few can soar into the stratosphere. Jeff Bezos notoriously glommed up an extra $13 billion in just one 24-hour period and promises to become America's first trillionaire once the dystopian dust finally settles - with or without survivors, with or without a superfluous exploited labor force.

What other conclusion can we reach than to acknowledge that our ruling elites are deliberately making a horrendous situation even worse? What is different in 21st century America from what the British lords intended for Ireland nearly 200 years ago?

As economist Thomas Piketty writes in "Capital and Ideology," those elites demonstrated the "quasi-explicit Malthusian goal of reducing the number of the poor and the number of rebels to boot."

That the elimination of the poor through Social Darwinism is the explicit goal of the "bad cop," or Republican, side of the ruling duopoly is a given. Donald Trump's  goal of eliminating protesters by sending Homeland Security forces to Portland to roust them has initially failed, largely because he went about it in his usual oafish incompetent manner. The "good cops" of the oligarchic duopoly have therefore been temporarily forced to withhold their usual rubber stamp approval of funding for Homeland Security, to try and keep up the pretense that we do not live in a police state. At the same time, they are adamantly supporting continued militarization of local police forces.

If the Democrats had any actual political will or interest in serving the mass of constituents who are not members of the donor class of task masters, their national political platform would contain a guaranteed national income, guaranteed housing and guaranteed single payer health care.

None of these things was on Franklin Roosevelt's vaguely worded "Forgotten Man" 1932 platform, either. He and the political class of the Great Depression had to be scared into passing initial New Deal legislation by socialist rabble- rousers and unions and rent strikers.

Even with this modicum of relief, as Frances Fox Piven notes, the protests continued. 

"They were crucial in pressuring reluctant state and local officials to implement the federally initiated aid programs... By the mid-1930s, mass strikes were a threat to economic recovery and to the Democratic voting majorities that had put FDR in office. A pro-union labor policy was far from Roosevelt's mind when he took office in 1933. But by 1935, strikes escalating and the election of 1936 approaching, he was ready to sign the National Labor Relations Act."

This bowing to popular demand followed a pattern. A similar thing had happened in famine-stressed Ireland, where rural tenants refused to pay rent, occupied the property they'd been ordered to vacate, and fought back against police and the landlords' private militias. The Gladstone government, duly frightened, finally passed the first Irish Land Act in 1870.

It turned out that when push came to shove, the sacred right of private property was not quite as sacrosanct as the owning class liked to pretend. The rationale, Piketty writes, was then and still is now, that if the elites give the poor too much relief and and too many rights, society itself might collapse. But eventually, the British elites relented -much as FDR's party relented in the 1930s - not so much because they'd suddenly developed any empathy for the poor, but because they were scared for their own hides.

Only when they realized that the poor simply weren't buying into their elite propaganda of imminent societal collapse from too much fairness (for the simple fact that the poor had nothing left to lose) did the Lords change their tune in a big fat hurry. They knew that unless they agreed to some reappropriation of wealth, a true bottom-up revolution threatened to become a reality. Their world would be the one to collapse.

In the case of Ireland, tenants were allocated their own land, and landlords were compensated by the government, temporarily placating the masses of people. In the case of the United States, cash relief and a jobs guarantee and retirement security were enacted. In the case of both, elites have been chipping away at these reforms ever since.

Democratic challenger Joe Biden's vow to "Build Back Better" is, without any real economic relief, nothing but a vague promise to build upon a foundation of neoliberal quicksand. Because he is no Barack Obama, who was so charmingly adept at fooling most liberals most of the time with his glib doublespeak of hope and change and "winning the future" by "sharing the sacrifice" with billionaires, it's an absolute given that the street protests will continue unabated all across America, even with a Democratic restoration.

Because Trump defeat or no Trump defeat, we will still be living in a failed state come Inauguration Day, 2021. The social contract will still have been broken into a thousand little pieces. As legal scholar Rosa Brooks has written of failing states, America still will have  lost "control over the means of violence," unable to create peace and stability for its citizens, unwilling to ensure economic growth through a more equitable redistribution of social goods, and still ruled by the "violent competition for resources."

Biden's selection of a Black woman as his vice president will not achieve the oligarchic goal of quelling dissent through identity politics. One top contender,Kamala Harris, is a former prosecutor who jailed the poor mothers of truant children and exploited prison labor, even under a court order to stop doing it. Another, former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice, is an architect of the Libyan regime change war, resulting in a modern-day slavery system in that particular fail-by-design state. The least-bad choice, Karen Bass, once advocated Medicare For All before orchestrating the congressional Kinte Cloth stunt in lieu of giving health care to everybody. She also just "walked back" her kind words about Fidel Castro in hopes of increasing her veep chances.

But the pendulum is swinging back in our direction. Perhaps we can convince - as in, scare shitless - a Biden administration into commandeering vast parcels of vacant oligarchic real estate and transforming it into affordable housing. The owners and landlords and donors comprising his base would, of course,  be fully and fairly compensated, just as they once were in Ireland, Uncle Joe's beloved ancestral home.

We've got to take advantage of the pendulum-swinging while the pendulum-swinging's still good. It happens so rarely in the favor of the have-not majority.