In the German city of Rostock, two young men not yet in their twenties and a guy who was a little older than forty took off on a  boozing spree, recently, to celebrate “Father’s Day” together.(1)They had a handcart with them, probably in order to transport a keg of beer. Something that is not unusual, especially among the working class in Germany. People do it to celebrate the First of May, too. A custom that must have evolved around 1900, before May Day was a holiday, at a time when workers were glad to leave the black industrial towns on Sunday, turning to the parks (if there were any) and  nearby forests. They had no cars, of course; any outing meant that they walked. Today, the down and out, the long-term unemployed, young adults without a job also don’t have a car.(2) What is ecologically sensible is usually an effect of poverty, not insight. If you are a rich kid, having rich parents I mean, of course you have a car. Regardless of whether you have a job or not. And if you are twenty and already successfully selling illegal drugs or smuggled cigarettes, you also have a car. If you’re in the extortion business, working for the mafia,  they even give you a fast sports car.

These three men walked. And returning, tired and drunk, from their outing, there was a squabble about the handcart. Perhaps because one of them was too tired and drunk and wanted to sit in the car, as a passenger, pulled along by the other two – who knows? At any rate, the two kids or young adults beat down the older fellow. And when he lay on the pavement, their heavy boots were kicking against his head until he was silent. Dead.(3)

I remember that fifty years ago there were quarrels, too. Also bloody noses and black eyes. But working people, kids as well as adults, on the whole had a rule. You don’t beat somebody anymore who is defeated. Who lies on the pavement. You don’t stamp on the head of a man who’s been knocked out. 

Where is this senseless fury, this deep aggression in our society coming from?

What happened in Rostock is not as exceptional as it sounds to somebody not familiar with the situation in many depressed parts of Europe.

The increased competition in business, the increased power of MNCs, deregulation, not only the scrapping or modification of laws that protected labor but even more so the accompanying attitude of bosses and public authorities has produced a socio-psychological climate that is more tense than a few decades ago, among workers. The number of those who have been expelled from the ranks of those considered “useful” by business and who have been made redundant in one way or another and thus pushed into extreme poverty and anxiety, is enormous:  about 5 million according to the more conservative critics of official statistics. And about 6 or 6.5  million people  in “blooming” Germany, according to other estimates.(4)  Without dependents. At 8 million it would be 10 per cent of the entire population (rather than 10 % the labor force). Do we approach or have we already reached a situation where more than 20 per cent of the working population are affected in one way or another –  pushed out of normal jobs, idle at home or swelling the ranks of part-time workers, “leased” workers, the abominally badly paid “working poor” who need wage subsidies from the government in order to survive? Then it would be on par with the level of real unemployment in the U.S. Not bad, ehh?(5)  And the percentage of those who are thus defeated by society is probably higher in Italy, in Spain, in Portugal, in Greece. How about Poland, Hungary, and so on? I don’t know. I suspect that the picture is bleak.

While the material situation of millions has sharply deteriorating, contributing to increased anxiety by those not yet as extremely affected because they still hold normal jobs, and while the pychological climate at work has deteriorated in many cases, the media have also an effect. The yellow press fans jealousies, hate against foreigners, against so-called illegal immigrants, and of course against those they call welfare cheaters.

Then, there is the increasing wave of violence in the media. 
It is clear that the consumption of movies including videos who show levels and types of violence inconceivable a few decades ago has become almost standard, especially among young kids. 50 years ago, I heard my father say, They (and he meant the self-proclaimed “elite”, the ruling class, and especially the generals in their service) want young people to be ready for war. Want to lower the inhibition that keeps people from killing another human being.(6)

Was he wrong?

There are other factors that affect the socio-psychological situation of young people.
One factor is that they are being deserted. Left alone, very often, to cope with the world they face.

When, in Germany, after the demise of the pseudo-socialist dictatorship, five new states joined the federal union, the once West German and now German government almost immediately closed all the youth clubs in former East Germany. They fired the social workers that had worked there. Probably didn’t trust them, “ideologically.” And the expense of running the young clubs was deemed unnecessary.

But in the new states, or Lands as they say in Germany, factories were also closed at a rapid rate,  “as outmoded,”  soon after unification.

Critics say it happened BECAUSE WEST GERMAN INDUSTRY HAD THE CAPACITIES AND OVERCAPACITIES TO FILL EXISTING DEMAND. 

Unemployment, heretofore entirely unknown under etatist “socialism”, shot up. 

The older ones among those made “redundant” in the early 1990s in the Eastern part of the country went into early retirement, and this by and large with low pensions. 

Then there were those in their bloom who often looked for new jobs in vain – or got miserly paid jobs in the Western part of Germany, increasing thereby competition inside the working class over there. And helping, by way of their added presence and willingness to accept low pay, the  bosses who were more than ready to drive down wage levels which had already been under attack all over Western Europe. 

It was the young, and especially those who were less well educated and less well trained vocationally, who were hit even harder. Among the age group of those between 17 and 25,  unemployment is reaching the highest levels. This is a general trend in every country of Europe.(7) And unemployment among the young is nowhere worse than in de-industrialized and by-passed regions.(8) They either flee abroad, or to what so-called boom regions may exist in their own country – when they are well-qualified and still full of hope. Or they stay behind, some in places comparable to Buffalo and Detroit, some in locations comparable to small villages in Appalachia or North Dakota. 

When, before the fall of the old etatist “socialist” regime, even the villages had their youth club where the young could go, now there was nothing. Jobs were gone. Places where they could meet and dance and listen to music without having to spend money were gone. They were idled. And there was really nothing now. It was boredom, hopelessness, desolation that followed. So some fell for the Neo-fascists who came from the Western part of the country to recruit followers. In some rural parts and in some urban working class quarters, the percentage of neo-nazis and of skinheads may be considerable today. The increase of their numbers is often accompanied by xenophobic and autoritarian attitudes among their parents and grandparents. Some of the latter still imbued perhaps with the tenets and attitudes forced upon them by school teachers and SA neighbors during the short reign of the Nazis.

But let’s not mistake what I talk about  for an entirely post-“socialist”, East German phenomenon. The deterioration of the social situation of young people, since the early 1990s, was especially sharp in former East Germany where a lot of protection and care for the young generation had been in place, though certainly in a Prussian, somehow petit-bourgeois, authoritarian context. But the trend is more widespread.

What happened in Rostock, a city in former East Germany that has been hit hard by unemployment, also happened – in a slightly different context, in Munich (a so-called boom town) some time ago.(9)  There, the kids who beat an elderly subway passenger to death, finishing him off by kicking his head with their boots when he lay on the ground, apparently were bored kids of  well-to-do middle class families of achievers. Or so it seems. Perhaps the parents were so chained up in the rat race that they had neither time nor patience to care for their kids. Perhaps they gave them money, instead of affection. Who knows.(10)
 

When the going gets tough, people get tough. When life is hard, people are hardened, experience tell us. Experience – or the way selective perception lets us interprete it. No, there is no automatic connection, no simple and evident causal determinism in the sense that such sayings suggest. There are more factors of influence, more causes than we perceive. And there is the freely blooming or the stifled “creative potental” of all human beings that lets them deal or cope with situations that are hard to bear. 

That, in part, has a lot to do with defeat or evading defeat. But to evade defeat, we need others. Especially as kids. We need the adults who give us warmth, and confidence and strength. And yes, a lot of kids don’t get that. When their parents were deafened and defeated by circumstance. Perhaps already as kids. And then, later on, were never able to give their kids the warmth they needed.

In Europe, neo-fascism isn’t rampant. It is marginal. But the hardness and lack of compassion and readiness to fight just for yourself, trampling on the rights and if necessary, on the bodies of Others, is far more widespread. It is akin to the neo-fascist phenomenon. Immigrants, for instance, are no longer loathed by the majority because “this is the superior white race” but because public coffers are believed to be empty. To decently care for refugees costs money. And “we don’t even have money to care for our poor.” Similarly, the small shop owner who hardly makes ends meet tells me that the unemployed should not get unemployment benefits. They should go hungry. Whoever does not work, shall not eat, he quotes what he thinks the bible teaches him. He selects the message from the bible that suits his world view and experience. An experience of life as a battle for survival.

On such beliefs, conservative and reactionary politicians and their parties depend. Set the people against each other! Okay, fine, you fan this spirit in the media. But the spark that ignites it is already there, in the form of loveless childhoods. Which are in turn a result of the hardness of working life, the lack of love in society at large that parents experience. A vicious circle that produces, among the underdogs and among the profiteers of the system, a mentality that you might call “social darwinist.” 

It was the ideology at the root of the kind of U.S. imperialism we observed in the 1890s, holding on to the dogma of manifest destiny. It was at the root of European colonialism and imperialism before WWI. It lead straight on to the big war, a logical clash of interest, fanned by the ideology of the time. And it was all proto-fascist. An announcement of the brutality of the civil war in Russia and the Gulag. An announcement of the death camps in Europe, of fascist six-million-fold genocide. Of the genocidal campaigns of the Japanese in China. O yes, it was preceded of course for 500 years by slavery and exploitation and genocide in the colonies. Yes, genocide. Which still goes on now that the colonies have become “independent” territories targeted by globalized robbery. Didn’t it produce between about six million (or more?) casualties in the D.R. Congo quite recently? And the pillage, and the killing, the intervention by outside forces, the raping of Congolese women and the devastation caused by rapacious mining of coltan and gold and other rare minerals still goes on.(11)

The mentality that looks away and condones all that is there. As is the protest against it. We live in a hard, in a hardened, and a divided society. Where a lot of social-darwinism survives.

We have not transcended that. The violence. The effects and attitudes inscribed in a context that tells all of us: You are on your own. Fight for your own survival. Don’t care for the rest. – But of course without caring for the rest, and without being cared for,  as babies, as sick people and as the aged, we don’t make it. Without cooperation of a work team, no car, no place is produced. And still, the divisiveness of the media, of the wrong ethos of the competition they preach, continues. The antagonisms among ourselves that exploded in a hellish way, in wars, in fascist dictatorships. We have just lowered the flame. The intensity. 

In Athens, Greece, vivid and awake human beings meet on Constitution Square and demand a more humane society, participative democracy. Hundreds of thousands take to the streets, protesting against the robbery. Against austerity measures (as the media call this attack) that are suggested and enforced by the IMF and the European Commission. By the banks, the lenders who lend money at outrageously high rates. And the people in the street know what everybody knows:  The “elite” of the country is largely abroad and their billions – stashed away in Swiss bank accounts. They don’t pay taxes THOUGH THEY OWN SHIPPING LINES AND BANKS THAT BLOOMED THANKS TO THE LABOR OF THEIR COMPATRIOTS: so the coffers of the country are empty. 

In the run-down quarters of the Greek capital, the native-born poor survive next door to even poorer “illegal” immigrants, some in the country for more than two decades already. And right-wing racism blooms in Athens in just the way it does in Rome, Paris, Berlin, Antwerp, Rotterdam or Madrid.

Frantz Fanon, a physician faced with the internal violence that bloomed in Algeria before the uprising, was surprised how these senseless acts of violence among a poor and frustrated population evaporated when there was suddenly a common goal: to drive out the French colonialists and achieve indepedence.

No, I’m not advocating violence as a solution, as Sorel would have done in his time. 

O no, I’m just saying, the pent-up anger, the frustration, lets some of us turn against irrational targets. Lets the people, or some  of them, turn against the people. As if we had to hit those we love. Out of mere helplessness and frustration. Look at the Tea Party movement. All the frustrated, angry Americans, underdogs who take it out on underdogs.(12)

And in Europe, isn’t it pretty much the same picture? Yesterday, my brother came to see me and mentioned that at the bus station he had overheard a middle-aged man. From all he could tell by his looks probably someone with a very badly paid job. The guy was cussing at the bums, the unemployed idling around in the bus station neighborhood. We all know they have no chance to find a job. And still this guy in his wretched clothes who was returning from work, and who probably earns a lot less than the U.S. minimum wage, was angry. “They should be working their ass off, like me.” That’s probably what was on his mind.

Yes, the bosses and the politicians can sleep securely if this mentality persists among a lot of us. And if those who are active and awake will not find a way to give an impulse to all of us. Also to the discouraged and disillusioned. And those eaten up by hatred of themselves and their fellow beings because they never encountered human warmth themselves.

Strange that something of the sort, for a short period, happened, now and then.  Sisterhood. Brotherly feelings. In France, in Italy, when people experienced liberation at the end of WWII. In Algeria, when there was hope to build a free country, briefly. In Portugal, in the context of their April revolution. In Chile, under Allende. In Nicaragua when Somoza was toppled. In Vietnam, they had an interesting slogan during the war. “Hatred into energy.” It’s all about transforming a negative emotion into a positive effort to achieve change.

Can we do it here? And are we prepared to see that the real tasks loom ahead of us afterwards? When the mere goal of building a good society – a goal that we may finally embrace –  will not be enough to avoid mistakes…
 
 

Notes

(1) “Today Germany's Vatertag [father's day] is supposed to be closer to a "boys' day out" and a pub tour with the guys (Männerrunde) than the more family-oriented Father's Day in the U.S. […]                 In some regions  groups of men (few of them fathers) […] go off into the country to have a "Joe Six-Pack" party on Vatertag […]”  - Hyde Flippo, “Father's Day and Vatertag. Different holidays on different dates” in: About.com    (  http://german.about.com/od/holidaysfolkcustoms/a/vatertag.htm )

(2) Since about 1973, the appearance and continuing persistence of prolonged mass unemployment in Western Europe has led to the pauperization of millions of families who were pushed out of  “normal” jobs for good and who either lived continually on welfare or relied on odd jobs, including so-called “schwarzarbeit [black labor]” (i.e. informal work that produces marginal incomes as well as tax evasion combatted, usually unsuccessfully, by the IRS ). 
The “welfare reforms” initated since the 1990s were determined to “activate” adults that were permanently squeezed out of the labor market. These long-term unemployed had often remained jobless for many years in a row, some on an "on and off" basis. The  main effect of these "reforms"  (that are referred to as  HartzIV reform  in Germany, after their proponent, Mr. Hartz, a top manager of Volkwagen Inc. at the time who was later on charged with a key role in corruption, i.e. the bribing of top union officials representing Volkswagen workers) was the added rapid pauperization of those who were unlucky enough to be unemployed for a day more than 365 days in a row, because they were subjected to all the denigration HartzIV recipients are routinely subjected to. And this even though they  had not yet joined the ranks of those permanently excluded, and stood a chance of being absorbed by the labor market in the next upturn. 
A recent study confirmed what we knew all along: in the German context, youngsters “between the ages of 20-24 years in East Germany are extremely affected by unemployment.” - Thomas Kieselbach et al, “Youth Unemployment and Social Exclusion: Objective Dimensions, Subjective Experiences, and Institutional Respondes in Six European Countries (YUSERDER). Final Report.” IPG Universität Bremen ( http://www.ipg.uni-bremen.de/research/yuseder/YUSEDER_Final_Report.pdf )

(3) Cf. Nicole Goebel (apn/dpa), “Teenagers sentenced for murder that shocked Germany”, in:  DW-World.de Deutsche Welle, Sept. 6, 2010 
( http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5977606,00.html ). 
Cf. also Sarah Harman (epd, dpa), “Memorial ceremony held on first anniversary of Munich subway hero's death”, in: DW-World.de Deutsche Welle, Sept. 12, 2010 
( http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5998305,00.html )

(4)The official seasonally adjusted German unemployment rate given by the German Federal Labor Office (a government agency) was somewhat above 12% in January 2006 and somewhat above 8 % in July 2009. ( Edward Hugh, “What is the level of real unemployment in Germany and Japan?” 
in:   A Fistful of Euros. European Opinion 
( http://fistfulofeuros.net/afoe/what-is-the-real-level-of-unemployment-in-germany-and-japan/ )
Edward Hugh notes that “Analysts at Societe Generale […] have examined the case of the German employment protection programme, and point out that while official unemployment in Germany has in fact only risen moderately in the current recession the underlying real effective rate is much higher. […]The Societe Generale interpretation is broadly supported by survey evidence […] [T]he numbers [of workers] resorting to the [protection] programme have indeed exploded and by March of this year (the latest available data), there were 1.3 million workers with shortened hours [Kurzarbeit], and this number has probably now risen to around 1.4 million. These are clearly big numbers, amounting to about 3% of the labour force. If they were added to unemployment figures, total unemployment would rise to the previous historic peaks of around 5 million.” 
It is necessary to add, however, that the 5 million figure does not reflect the large number of unemployed shoved into job qualification and training programs who are not included in the unemployment statistics. Or those in precarious (low-wage part-time and one-euro) jobs who don’t count as unemployed because they have accepted ridiculously insufficient work proposals, knowing that otherwise they would be 100 per cent unemployed rather than 90 per cent, 80 per cent or 75 per cent short of the fulltime job they covet.  And of course, the official statistics  exclude the number of those who continue to be 100 per cent unemployed but don’t apply for unemployment benefits anymore after one year of unemployment because they are not entitled to receive further (HartzIV) benefits (for instance because the income of their spouse is above the limit that allows you to apply for HartzIV). The official statistics also do not include youngsters willing to enter the job market who see no chance to do so and opt for further education instead.

(5) Grant Lawrence, “Real Unemployment Rate Over 21%” , in: Economy in Crisis. America’s Economic Report  Daily,  March 8, 2010 
( http://www.economyincrisis.org/content/real-unemployment-rate-over-21 )
This report gives the real unemployment rate in the US as 21 per cent while other critical economist arrive at a figure slightly higher (23 pecent). - The German unemployment rate given by the author is not the real unemployment rate (as is suggested) but the official rate.

(6) In the early 1960s, my father was talking about films released at the time that probably were brutal enough, but far less brutal and far less accessible than videos and video games today that in practice, in one way or another, at home or at the homes of friends, are even accessible to young kids. 
In other words, the tendency then identified has increased. 
Today, serious social critics, including child psychologists, contradict the often heard opinion that consumption of such videos has absolutely no effect on the level of violence that comes into play among ordinary citizens in a given society, including violence of youngsters –  of the type seen in Rostock or in Munich. And let’s not ignore violence by youth gangs, or shooting sprays following the pattern witnessed in Colombine, for that matter. 
On the other hand, other factors contribute to such violence, as well. Notably the increasing level of stress brought to bear today on people, even on school-age kids. The rough, competitive social “climate.” Then, of course, in a ghetto context, the experience of poverty and the hopelessness of kids who are seeing generation after generation jobless and wasted. The thought that petty crime pays,  and that it offers a way to participate in the American consumerist dream. Petty crime can evolve into big crime, at times. 
It is true that Hollywood continues to offer role models, the type of the “cool” gangster, for instance. But at the root, side by side with the films and videos and  further “outside factors” such as stress and living under conditions of extreme deprivation and denigration, an “interior” factor that people like Erich Fromm, Alice Miller and Arno Gruen have reflected on, is identifiable in many cases as a cause of ordinary violence between civilians:  It is the lack of human warmth experienced in childhood and an authoritarian upbringing that results in an authoritarian character structure in turn, conditioning people in a way that is not conducive to a creative development and that limits their ability to empathize. 
It is likely that consumption of certain video games that have been dubbed “killer games”  may  have a reenforcing effect on soldiers sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. Such video games may be seen as initiations into military violence, as “preparatory.” Shooting peaceful civilians like lame ducks from a chopper may be like aiming at “live targets” in a “killer” game. Are these games (that test and enhance the players ability to react very quickly) also produced by companies with connections to the Pentagon? 
This suspicion is confirmed in an article by  N.Frei who states: “[…] violence and war is promoted by killer games. As early as in the last decades of the past century killer-games, so called killing simulators, were made use of in the US Army and police for man-to-man combat. Later theses games were allowed to be sold on the free market by the Pentagon, the war ministry of the USA, to be used privately. The sales of PC-killer-games boomed as a consequence. The games industry today still co-operates closely with the Pentagon, as well as the film industry, whenever Hollywood produces films glorifying violence.” H. Frei, “Ban of Killer Games” 
( http://www.currentconcerns.ch/index.php?id=1100&print=1&no_cache=1 ) 
Those close to the video game industry of course contest the findings that violent video games have a negative socio-pychological effect. Cf. [N.N.],  “Banning video games will not halt youth violence”, in: Live Leak. Redefining the media, 7 Mar 2009 
( http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e91_1237791908 ) 
In view of the big turnover and high profit margins, this “industry” has the political muscle to lobby successfully against the prohibition of “killer video games.” The same of course is true in the case of the producers of guns, including makers of semi-automatic weapons who rely on the NRA to defend their business interests.

(7) “Spain has the highest youth-unemployment rate, at 42%, more than twice the unemployment rate of adults aged 25-54,” the Economist wrote in 2010. Cf. N.N., “Youth unemployment.Young and jobless”, in: The Economist (Online)  Dec 16th 2010.
( http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/12/youth_unemployment  )
The Economist also stated that  “Germany has the lowest ratio (1.3), largely thanks to its successful apprenticeship system.” 
But first of all, it has to be pointed out that many apprentices are  made redundant  - and then remain unemployed, often for much more than a year - immediately after finishing their miserly paid apprenticeship. An apprenticeship which, as such, often amounts to mere exploitation. In many cases, the young are just cheap helps asked to work hard without being taught the expected vocational skills.
In addition, is is unclear where the Economist gets a figure like 1.3 per cent. According to the United Nations Statistics Division which relies on data from the German Federal Labor Office,  the official youth unemployment rate for males age 15-24 in Germany was 15.4 per cent in 2004, 16.8 per cent in 2005, 14.8 per cent in 2006, 12.6 per cent in 2007 and 11 per cent in 2008. 
The corresponding figures for East German males age 15-24 are higher than the averages given here. 
The official youth unemployment rate for the entire age group is kept below the real unemployment rate of youngsters because the age bracket considered for the calculation quite fictitiously includes 15 and 16 year olds and mistakenly encompasses their number in the total of those “who might enter the job market”. But none of these 15 and 16 year old kids will register as job seekers “who can’t get a job”. After all, kids under 17 are compelled to attend school and thus 15 and 16 year olds cannot even enter the regular job market at all. 
In addition, a large percentage of the 17, 18 and even 19 year-old kids are still in high school. They are included in the total of “potential job seekers” as well, although by definition they will not look for jobs (other than part-time jobs during their summer vacation). 
To include them in the total of  the juvenile labor force amounts to a falsification of the statistics. Factually and legally they are students and not part of the labor force. They cannot join the ranks of the unemployed and they can't apply for unemployment benefits as “people looking for a job in vain.” 
Finally, many youngsters aged 18 to 24 years are in college. They too are included in the total of the “youth labor force” which forms the basis for the calculation of the percentage of unemployed youths.
The calculation of the unemployment rate should be based on the total of those 17 to 24 year-olds who actually try to enter the job market and who can’t find a job. We would probably get averages between 25 and 35 per cent, and higher rates in East Germany.
Male unemployment among youngsters is slighty higher than that of young women.
The officially given unemployment rate for women, age 15-24 was 13.9 per cent in 2005, 12.5 per cent in 2006 and  9.9 in 2008.

(8)  D. Soyez notes that “in eastern Germany especially Thuringia and Saxony experienced strong de-industrialization.” Cf. Dietrich Soyez, “De-industrialization and its spatial consequences” , in: Virtuelle geographische Texte  ( http://www.v-g-t.de/english/brd/module/m2/u8.htm )
But deindustrialization has also struck the iron and steel sector around Berlin and in Eisenhuettenstadt. And a harbor city like Rostock (situated in the state of Mecklenburg - Western Pomerania), the former center of GDR shipbuilding, has been hit hard by the crisis that hit this sector of industry. 

(9)  [DPA/DAPD/hc], “Drinks Wagon Fight Led to Fatal Rostock Beating“, in: The Local. Germany’s News in English, June 3, 2011 ( http://www.thelocal.de/national/20110603-35425.html )

(10)  ‘Successful’ parents who either hope or feel compelled to invest all their energies in  their so-called careers are increasingly prone to replace emotional care for their children by ‘material incentives.’ – The negative psychological effects have been discussed by Arno Gruen and others. On the other hands, the management of most companies tends to intensify work as well as competition inside the company, leaving employees little leeway.

(11) Cf. Keith Harmon Snow, “The War that did not make the Headlines: Over Five Million Dead in Congo? Behind the Numbers Redux: How Truth is Hidden, Even When it Seems to Be Told”, in: Global Research (Canada)
( http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7957 )

(12) Of course the Tea Party movement is a complex phenomenon that cannot be adequately “summed up” in a single sentence. It claims to be directed primarily against “politicians in Washington.” Still, in addition to “producing” mavericks, it also relies on quite a few established right-wing politician, both in Washington and in diverse state capitals. It is directed primarily against welfare for the poor, health care for the presently uninsured, free abortion, classrooms and teachers for school-age kids of “illegal” immigrants. It targets those perceived to be weaker and less fortunate, just like many among yesteryear’s “poor whites” targeted  “blacks” who were poor.
The Tea Party movement is not exclusively a movement of conservative “white” workers who see real wages diminishing, and their jobs endangered by NAFTA, and who may fear competing “Third World” labor not only outside but even more inside the U.S.A.
It is also a movement of certain professionals, of self-employed “middle class” people, of small entrepreneurs and owners of mid-sized firms who see their incomes eroded, theirs property devalued, their business hurt by the crisis and who denounce the vestiges of a “welfare state” in the U.S. as too costly and even as “socialist.”
The strange thing is: While they all take it out on “those below them” in terms of income, property, and “status,” they don’t attack tax-cuts for the very wealthy or the power of MNCs that have pushed for NAFTA.
 
 

            The author of this article recommends the following interview with Prof. Noam Chomsky:

check.:http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/17/democracy_uprising_in_the_usa_noam