Umair Haque’s got a new “notepad” blog up, and this morning posted a very hard-hitting reaction to news that OECD, the heavyweight establishment economic think-tank, is recommending a hike in interest rates. Sample quote:

Call it the Big Squeeze—because what it really means is that middle classes are going to be squeezed out of existence, as wealth is transferred upwards, to plutocrats.

Like me, he’s deeply frustrated by the European and American middle class’s total failure to mount resistance to being robbed blind by corporatists and the very rich. 

I’m grateful that folks like Joe Stiglitz, Robert Reich and Haque (especially Haque, as I think he reaches a different demographic than the choir Stiglitz and Reich preach to, e.g. old-school liberal elite) are calling attention, in very strong terms, to the bald-faced class war the very wealthy have waged against the rest of us since the economic meltdown. 

Haque nails the reason it’s happening now: the plutocrats and their media and political operatives now know that they can get away with it, that the bulk of the middle and working classes and the poor are narcotized to the point where we won’t do a thing to stop the assault, at least not until we’ve “snapped like twigs.” 

Many obviously ARE angry, but the rich — and the global corporations, which really have experienced a kind of social “Singularity,” evolving into intelligent, independent entities that are beyond human morality and very nearly beyond human control — saw that we’ve done absolutely nothing to hold them accountable for the systemic criminality that led to the collapse. And, knowing that anxious, fearful people are far more likely to look sideways and down at those who might compete for and take away what little they have than they are to look up at what the plutocrats are doing, they realized that they could dress up any agenda they wanted in a little demagoguery (“overpaid teachers are to blame! Immigrants are to blame!!”), ride it into political office, and further pillage the global economy. 

So, yeah, I’ll take fries with those mass riots. I’m afraid nothing’s going to change until people can’t even afford their cable TV and McBurgers, realized they’re good and well fucked, and run out of Stockholm syndrome–style justifications for why it’s perfectly okay for the plutocracy to keep glomming more and more wealth and power to itself.

Sigh. Used to be that I was the incrementalist, and my father the radical. But the last couple years have radicalized me — we’re not going to see any real change to the above trends until the masses come out of their coma. And when they do, things are going to get really, really ugly.