Misunderstandings About Class Warfare

Like Warren Buffet said, "There's a class warfare all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

The letter that Dave Zweifel wrote about in The Capital Times underscores the fact that the rich are winning, and they are winning because they are pitting working people against each other. Apparently, some of the working people fail to grasp simple realities, as "Brenda"'s letter illustrates. The article is a must read.

America's Last Stand

"No, we will not balance the budget on the backs of working families, the elderly, the sick, the children, and the poor, who have already sacrificed enough in terms of lost jobs, lost wages, lost homes, and lost pensions. Yes, we will demand that millionaires and billionaires and the largest corporations in America contribute to deficit reduction as a matter of shared sacrifice. Yes, we will reduce unnecessary and wasteful spending at the Pentagon. And, no we will not be blackmailed once again by the Republican leadership in Washington..."

So begin Sen. Bernie Sanders's remarks, given today on the floor of the Senate. Please read Sen. Sanders's entire floor speech, particularly if you are inclined to support the Republicans' view of budgetary issues. Perhaps you will be touched by the senator's words, perhaps you won't. If that's the case you are an ideologue and nothing will move you. I just hope that you will never find yourself in the situations that Sen. Sanders's correspondents described to him.

But if you do not emphatize with Sen. Sanders's plea and with the cry for help of those who sent their prayers to him, if you don't realize that these are not people who are looking for handouts but regular folks, who are tired of being financially raped by those who rule unopposed (not the politicians, but those that buy their services) while they themselves struggle to keep a roof on their heads, food on their table, life-saving medication in their pill-box, and gas in their tank in spite of doing everything they were told and taught to do, then maybe I should wish the same dire predicaments on you as well, for that might be the only way you can regain the humanity you lost somewhere along your ephemeral trek on this planet. No one is born without a shred of humanity.

We are, save rare exceptions, all born with the ability to feel our kin's suffering, to feel empathy for one another, to be compassionate. We are taughtby the masters of the ideology of selfishness, the children of Ayn Rand and of American biblical fundamentalism's incestuous relationship with corporate power, to look at others as if they were so different from ourselves, to think that if they need help it's because they have failed, because they made the wrong choices, because they are lazy, and because they expect the tyrannical state to help them instead of an imaginary god, be it the Christian god, or Mammon or who knows what other irrational distortion of reality.

If you are so lost in your own selfish idolatry that you fail to be moved by Sen. Sanders's words, I pity you because you are a failure to the god you worship, whatever it is, and a miserable fellow traveler in this life.

Tax Day Is Gone, But Not The Silly Rhetoric

Republicans like to pretend that they know how to fix the deficit and budget problems: just slash taxes and spending, and tax revenues will grow and the deficit will decline. That is their recipe for fiscal success. Except that it omits facts: yes, slashing spending could reduce the deficit (at the expense of the neediest Americans, including children--because the culture of life... well, you know all about that holy crap) but the if the revenue side continues to falter, largely because of Republican fiscal policy, then how much exactly needs to be slashed.

NPR had a more realistic take of things yesterday, on Tax Day. You can read it or listen to it. The report is called Looking At Who Pays What In Taxes.

Frankly, I am fed up with Republicans telling me that taxes for the rich need to be cut, when the amount of taxes they actually pay has declined from 26 to 17% over the last 20 years and their income has grown more than that of any other income group. You should be too.

The Attack on Unions and Corporate Tax Dodgers

Read Stop the Corporate Tax Dodgers, a timely post by Chuck Collins, co-author with Bill Gates Sr. of Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes and director of Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Civility, Schmivility

David Michal Green, bless him, is not interested in being civil to those who are "seeking to take what we have so that they can live ever wealthier lives while ours are short, nasty and brutish because of their institutionalized and legalized theft."

Hopefully the number of people who see things with his clarity will rise as he keeps publishing his thoughts at The Regressive Antidote.

Class Warfare Hypocrisy

Interesting article on class warfare. The real one, that is.

Beware of those who accuse governments that try to bring relief to the poor and huddles masses as statists, while hailing those whose intent is to crush the same masses into servitude and submission as paladins of freedom.

Quote for Conservatives, from a Conservative

In the age of Barack Obama, many rank-and-file conservatives have been more upset about redistribution of a different sort – the kind that takes money from the prosperous and ''spreads the wealth'' (as Obama put it, in his famous confrontation with Joe the Plumber) down the income ladder.

This kind of spending can be problematic. But conservatives need to recognize that the most pernicious sort of redistribution isn't from the successful to the poor. It's from savers to speculators, from outsiders to insiders, and from the industrious middle class to the reckless, unproductive rich.


From “The Class War We Need”, by conservative New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat,