I saw the article that follows below and it got me thinking. Folks, it is not about class envy. It is about the survival of the country. We have been programmed to believe that any commentary about the wealthy’s disproportionate share of our nation’s income, wealth, or political power is either class envy or class warfare. Fox News constantly pushes that line as well as Right Wing radio and practically every Right Wing Republican. This is a well-designed and poll tested attempt to give you pause. After all, nobody wants to be accused of envy or promoting some kind of warfare. Additionally, everyone wants to believe that they could be rich. Sadly that is not in the cards for the vast majority of Americans as the upward mobility of the middle class is eroding because of specific policies.
No one that I know is envious of the wealthy. No one that I know wants a class war. Yet, the policies of our government and the behavior of many of our corporations and our titans of finance have been effecting a class war on us.
If it is class warfare against the wealthy when we ask a private equity firm member to pay the same rate as the middle class, then was it class warfare against the middle class when lobbyist bribed politicians to effect that special rate on them only? Is it not class warfare on the middle class when wealthy owners of corporations can file for bankruptcy to get a fresh start while middle class student loan recipients cannot do the same? Is it not class warfare on the middle class when they must pay north of 15% tax on all their income while the wealthy pays 0% on all their income north of $110,000?
Let us stop believing the misinformation. Those that would continue policies to pilfer the working middle class frequently state the true fact that 47% of Americans do not pay federal income tax. What they fail to state is that they don’t because they make so little. Yet most of those that do not pay federal income tax do pay their full social security tax, their gasoline taxes, their sales taxes, their property taxes, and many other taxes. What is ironic is that the tax dollars collected by the government from the working middle class is immediately used to provide services to us all that are purchased generally from the corporations owned by the same wealthy class that is complaining about taxes and class warfare.
We must not succumb to fallacies. We must for the largest union of them all to get our voices heard. We must form the WORKING MIDDLE CLASS UNION. Will you join the Coffee Party now and help us help ourselves? Are with me?
Author Peter Edelman: Middle Class, Poor Should Unite Against The Rich
WASHINGTON — The doctrine of Bain Capital — as outlined by former managing director Edward Conard — is that the super rich got that way because they "earned" it.
The logical corollary is that financially battered middle-class Americans deserve what’s happening to them, too. And that the poor deserve to be poor.
Peter Edelman, a Georgetown University law professor and longtime anti-poverty advocate, takes the exact opposite view in his new book, "So Rich, So Poor."
At an event for the book Monday hosted by two leading liberal advocacy groups — the Center for American Progress and the American Constitution Society — Edelman urged action by, and on behalf of, the broadest possible coalition of the 99 percent, against the 1.
"We need to have the largest ‘we’ we can get to defend what we have," he said.
The goal, he indicated, should be to raise taxes on the rich and strengthen the social safety net — even as GOP leaders try to take it away.
"The first task, " Edelman said, is to "stand up and say broadly" that the Republican budget proposals calling for austerity and cutbacks to social service programs "are just destructive. And the rhetoric … is just weird."
Welfare "is basically gone," and now the GOP is going after everything else, he said. According to them, he said, "the whole problem is that we’re helping people too much."
Edelman despaired against members of the middle class who vote against their own economic interests — sometimes because they perceive the poor, rather than the rich, as the bigger economic threat.
"Our concern has to go all the way down to the bottom; all of the 99 percent if you will," he said.
Edelman’s book outlines the huge challenges an anti-poverty crusade faces. Indeed, its subhead reads: "Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America."
Edelman quit his high-level job in the Clinton administration in protest, after President Bill Clinton signed a law that ended the welfare guarantee.
Now, "we have six million people in this country whose only income is food stamps," he said. "We need a national conversation about how to get incomes up to a level that people can live on."
Edelman gave President Barack Obama high marks for passing a stimulus that was heavy on anti-poverty measures, for adding 16 million adults to Medicaid, and other actions.
His complaint about Obama is that the president rarely addresses poverty explicitly. "The p-word is not much in evidence," Edelman said. "We really just need to call out the word and put it out there in the discussion."
In his book, Edelman writes that he used to believe that the debate over antipoverty efforts and the debate about taxing the rich should be held separately, so antipoverty advocates wouldn’t be accused of favoring "class warfare."
But the rich have seized so much economic and political power that "we literally cannot afford to separate the two issues" anymore, he writes.
Author Peter Edelman: Middle Class, Poor Should Unite Against The Rich
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[...] The reality is that there needs to be systemic change in which there is the correct balance between “good government”, “good corporations”, and the individual with a bias towards the individual. In the book “As I See It: Class Warfare The Only Resort To Right Wing Doom” an attempt is made not only to describe the problem but talk solutions in layman form. Others have attempted to express solutions in more stark terms. [...]