“Class warfare” they said….
U.S. Representative Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas (why is it always the Texans? 
) said today that President Obama’s tax proposal today set “a new standard for class warfare.”
He may be right. And here’s why….
The OLD standard for class warfare was that the top 1% of income earners, the only group in the U.S. to have made any substantial financial gains since Republican administrations took over in 1980 (sorry, Republicans, it’s YOUR turn for “equal time” tonight), declared war on the bottom 99% of income earners. The OLD standard for class warfare meant that the very rich recruited the services of their “lapdogs” in government, people who can’t do math and would like to BELIEVE that they are “rich,” and stupid people in the electorate who do not “vote their own self-interest,” to tax what USED to be the “middle class” (there IS no “middle class” anymore, just the 1% and the 99%!), to push the cost of a college education out of the reach of the children of the 99% (you see how obnoxious and politically formidable a college education made the “Baby Boomers!” ), and to eliminate our jobs through age discrimination and offshoring.
If you want to look at effective “class warfare,” the OLD standard of the last 30 years presents a textbook case.
So what is the NEW standard for class warfare?
One of the most inspiring banners seen in protests over union-busting activities of the Republican governor in Wisconsin was a simple message hoisted high in the capitol building in Madison: “Tax the Rich.” The same message has been seen many other places, since.
I can sum up the position of a lot of Baby Boomers whose parents were members of the “middle class” in America. We are increasingly moving into retirement age. Many of us have been laid off “early” before we could collect any Social Security (which is supposed to be bankrupt by 2042, anyway!); we have had to be “underemployed” to survive, and our prospects for “retirement” are, for the first time in America, NOT AS GOOD as our parents’ prospects for retirement! Our grown children are struggling to raise THEIR young children, because the real income of that bottom 99% of Americans has not increased significantly in over 30 years! The prospects for a college education for the grandchildren of Baby Boomers is grim. College costs for public universities in California increased over 30% last year alone! There is no way to budget for those kinds of increases if your income has remained stagnant for 30 years! Is this a plan to “dumb down Americans” and make them easier to rule? I believe that the evidence is overwhelming that it is. Class warfare, textbook…. We are also aware (if you have been a regular reader of this blog, you are) that there will be about TWO people working in 2030 in the U.S. to support EACH retiree. I would not want to pay their payroll taxes.
So the Baby Boomers (and we’ve never been a “quiet” group ) are … as mad as hell, and we’re not going to take this anymore! (Network, 1976)
So, perhaps the “first shot” fired in this NEW standard for class warfare was voting out a group of incumbent Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives (“The People’s House”) and electing what appears to be a naive and ideological group of Republicans, to send a message. The next major “shot” SHOULD be voting OUT the next group of Republicans to come up for re-election and replacing them with, hopefully, a gradually awakening group of Democrats, who will start to understand that it is not that The People support their ideology, it is that we want members of government to compromise and work together to solve REAL PROBLEMS in the REAL WORLD.
President Obama attacked the House Republican 2012 budget proposal made public last week, saying that it would “… lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known throughout most of our history.”
He’s right. We have been leading up to that “fundamentally different America” for the last 30 years in which our (the bottom 99%) incomes have remained stagnant. For the most part, BUSINESSES have caused that stagnation, NOT government.
House Speaker John Boehner, Republican-Ohio, said, “Any plan that starts with job-destroying tax hikes is a non-starter.” He’s wrong. I am from Ohio, and Ohio jobs were destroyed in most part by union-busting activities that shipped out industrial jobs to cheaper non-union labor in other places – first to other states, and then to other countries. Further union-busting activities have occurred in Columbus (Yes, I lived there!) recently, spurred on by events in Madison, WI. (I lived there, too!) Ideologically-driven businesspeople, left to their own devices, will destroy BOTH jobs and the economy of the country that harbors them. Greedy financial companies on Wall Street INITIATED the “Great Recession”, then offshored it, and the same policies threaten to PERPETUATE it. Another case of not learning from history, and of the “judging” function overpowering the “thinking” function….
So, where are the clowns (and the comedy) in this tragedy? Some are the legislative “lapdogs” who are financially supported by that very rich 1%, but who themselves will never actually have incomes in that top 1%. (Is Jeb Hensarling in the top 1%? Or is he an ideologue…?) Others are the legislative lackeys who work for the rich for FREE, trapped by their ideology and snap-judgments. Some are the uneducated (more of these all the time!) who believe the lies that turn members of the lower class (the 99%) against each other. Others are members of the 99% who are doing moderately well, and would rather believe themselves to be rich, even though their incomes will NEVER reach the top 1%. These last two groups foolishly do not “vote their own self-interest.”
It’s time to wake up, elected government officials! The last major election results indicate that you will have only a very short time to be responsive to The People before being voted out yourselves.
And you had better “Tax the Rich,” because the rest of us are tired of supporting them….
-Bill at
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