I wrote this as a preface to the article below almost three years ago. It is amazing how entrenched we are in our modus operandi that so little gets changed. In finding relevant articles for a new piece it popped up on Google and made it quite evident the working middle class has a lot of headwind ahead. This is why we fight. This is why we engage.
We must call it what it is; Class Warfare. The middleclass have been pilfered by the top 2% for the last 30 years. It is not about class or wealth envy. It is about survival. It is about survival of the middleclass. It is about survival of America as we know America should be.
The form of Capitalism being practiced in the United States is a clear and present danger to our society. Many refer to it as crony Capitalism. It is more dangerous than that. Crony capitalism would assume simply an incestuous relationship between our government and our corporations. What we have however is an incestuous relationship between our government, foreign governments, and our corporations.
The American middleclass has become a commodity that must work for slave wages simply to keep corporations employing in our country else they take their jobs overseas where governments ensure low wages, low social standards, and low environmental standards. Our corporations continue to coerce our regulatory structure to further maximize their profits at the expense of our environment and well-being.
Our tax laws ensure that the working man will never have the opportunity to enter the class of the wealthy. After-all, income of the common man as wages is taxed at a much higher marginal rate than capital gains from investments which is a major form of income for the wealthy. In other words, a wealthy investor sipping tea at his pool will make more and pay less in taxes than someone who wakes up every morning and performs a solid day’s work.
Until Americans stop buying the cool aid that the wealthy given a tax cut will create jobs, severe suffering and continued wealth and income disparities will continue. After-all no real jobs of consequence were created under the current Bush tax rates. The middleclass must ask themselves one simple question. If supply-side Capitalism (Reaganomics/Voodoo Economics) practiced in America was successful, why is it that during the 30 years of this type of Capitalism on steroids did the middleclass wealth and income fall while the top 2% went up by orders of magnitude.
Joseph A. Palermo: D-Day in the Class War
After a decade of stagnant or declining real wages, “bipartisan” schemes are proliferating to shift the burden of Washington policymakers’ own catastrophic mismanagement of the nation’s fiscal policies right onto the shoulders of working people. The press commentary has been abysmal. All “serious” thinkers out there on television or in print are in full agreement that “entitlements” must take a big hit, along with education and health care.
President Obama’s “bipartisan” deficit commission, co-chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, (sometimes referred to as the “Cat Food Commission” because of the likely dietary changes some senior citizens will have to make if its prescriptions are implemented), wants to cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations. Another high-profile group, headed by Pete Domenici and Alice Rivlin, (which might be called the “Kibble Commission”, wants to strip $650 billion out of the Social Security trust fund with a payroll tax holiday (to be paid back later!) that they believe will create economic growth. So the Cat Food Commission views Social Security in crisis and bordering on insolvency, while the Kibble Commission believes that Social Security can absorb a $650 billion hit. And these are the best and the brightest.
Both “bipartisan” bodies claim that “tough decisions” must be made. Yet their policies are only really tough if you happen to belong to America’s struggling working middle class. They want to inflict the “pain” on the government programs that have traditionally given working people a slight leg up. In these “bipartisan” schemes the financial services crooks who wrecked the economy come away smelling like roses.
Are we forgetting that it was working- and middle-class taxpayers who bailed out Wall Street’s biggest investment banks in what could be the greatest gesture of working-class benevolence toward the super-rich in American history? Working-class taxpayers also paid for the unemployment insurance and infrastructure projects that were needed following the pillaging of America’s housing sector. Working-class taxpayers continue to foot the bill for the bloated military budget and two wars. (They’ve also sent their sons and daughters off to fight.) And about eight million of them who had jobs in 2005 didn’t have them anymore by the middle of 2009.
And how are working taxpayers repaid for the assistance they’ve given to their fellow citizens of the investing class? They get “commissions” and “foundations” and elite “study groups” that are orchestrating the next giant rip-off of America’s middle class.
Few in the press seem to want to educate the public about how we got into this fiscal crisis in the first place or why projected budget surpluses at the beginning of the Bush years were so needlessly squandered. And remember, those surpluses were turned into deficits through “bipartisan” agreements, such as the Bush tax cuts, the wars, and the bailouts. There’s also precious little mention of the grotesque inequality in American society these days, which is worse than even during the Gilded Age. The establishment press seems determined to avoid the obvious conclusion: The rich, the super-rich, and the super-duper rich (as well as the conglomerates) must pay more in taxes to get the United States through the crisis. Ending the two debilitating wars and rolling back what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” should be next. And the billions of dollars wasted in corporate welfare each year must be diverted to human needs.
These steps should be the top priorities before any “deficit-reduction plan” is seriously considered — “bipartisan” or otherwise. At this moment in American history, after large swathes of the middle class have been wiped out, the last thing we need is another elite-driven assault on the living standards of working people.
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