First, I’d like to acknowledge that I did not come up with “Serf Pride” to describe the Jubilee festivities, although I sure wish I did!  The credit for that phrase goes to this person.

Last weekend, we were visiting friends out of town, and we couldn’t escape the wall-to-wall media coverage of Serf Pride.  Those friends had adapted an old slogan from some 24 hour sports network to describe the media coverage: EAT! SLEEP! QUEEN!

I wasn’t even going to acknowledge Serf Pride by bothering to write about it, but then I read this article in the Guardian about how the UK government forced people on social assistance to work the river pageant.  (h/t babble) And no, they didn’t get paid for it – they were voluntold.  But it gets better – they bussed them in the night before and forced them to sleep on the ground under the London Bridge.

We already know that Serf Pride is a celebration of the 1% taking their place in the ruling class of society due to their birth into a family of the 1%.  That so many of the 99% buy into this jingoistic crap is a perpetual head-scratcher, but I’m pretty much resigned to that.

But this story, about the unemployed being forced to work the pageant for free?  That goes beyond the everyday ordinary pathetic scene of the 99% happily grovelling before, and declaring their loyalty to, the 1%.

This has moved from pathetic to offensive.  This is pure class warfare, friends.  And the fact that it’s being waged so openly by the richest against the poorest in order to celebrate the reign of the richest shows just how brazenly confident the 1% are that the 99% will just go along with it and won’t fight back.