Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Every time someone talks about raising taxes on the rich conservatives start whining "that's class warfare!" And every time I have to remind them that, yes, there is a class war and the rich have been waging it against the middle class for decades -- and they are winning.
Wealth disparity in this country is at its widest gap ever. Not since the Gilded Age just prior to the Crash of 1929 has there been such wealth disparity. Income Gap Between Rich, Poor the Widest Ever - CBS News.
Over the past several decades, conservatives have successfully rolled back many of the New Deal programs of the 1930s and 1940s that built the American middle class after the wreckage of the Great Depression and a World War. They now have their sights set on dismantling the last vestiges of the New Deal: social security and labor laws (like the minimum wage). They also want to dismantle Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs of Medicare and Medicaid.
It is not just a class war but an ideological war to rewrite American history by erasing from history anything associated with the Progressive Movement reforms of the 20th Century. Just listen to their "intellectual" (sic) leader Glenn Beck.
Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr. writes Shadowy players in a new class war:
The 2010 election is turning into a class war. The wealthy and the powerful started it.
This is a strange development. President Obama, after all, has been working overtime to save capitalism. Wall Street is doing just fine, and the rich are getting richer again. The financial reform bill passed by Congress was moderate, not radical.
Nonetheless, corporations and affluent individuals are pouring tens of millions of dollars into attack ads aimed almost exclusively at Democrats. One of the biggest political players, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, accepts money from foreign sources.
The chamber piously insists that none of the cash from abroad is going into its ad campaigns. But without full disclosure, there's no way of knowing if that's true or simply an accounting trick. And the chamber is just one of many groups engaged in an election-year spending spree.
This extraordinary state of affairs was facilitated by the U.S. Supreme Court's scandalous Citizens United decision, which swept away decades of restrictions on corporate spending to influence elections. The Republicans' success in blocking legislation that would at least have required the big spenders to disclose the sources of their money means voters have to operate in the dark.
The "logic" behind Citizens United is that third-party spending can't possibly be corrupting. The five-justice majority declared that "this Court now concludes that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy."
You can decide what's more stunning about this statement, its naivete or its arrogance.
If one side in the debate can overwhelm the political system with clandestine cash, which is what's happening, is there any doubt that the side in question will buy itself a lot of influence? If that's not corruption, what exactly is it?
And how can five justices, who purport not to be political, sweep aside what elected officials themselves long ago concluded on the subject and claim to know what will or will not "cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy"? Could anything undermine trust in the system more than secret contributions to shadowy groups spending the money on nasty ads? The good news is that the class war is bringing a certain clarity to politics. It is also another piece of evidence for the radicalism of the current brand of conservatism. This, in turn, is forcing Democrats to defend a proposition they have been committed to since the days of Franklin Roosevelt but are often too timid to proclaim: that government has a legitimate and necessary role in making economic rules to protect individuals from abuse.
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The country doesn't need this class war, and it is irrational in any case. Practically no one, least of all Obama, is questioning the basics of the market system or proposing anything more than somewhat tighter economic regulations -- after the biggest financial collapse since the Great Depression -- and rather modest tax increases on the wealthy.
But even these steps are apparently too much for those financing all the television ads, which should lead voters to ask themselves: Who is paying for this? What do they really want? And who gave them the right to buy an election?
I have to disagree with Dionne that this is a "new" class war. It is just the latest battle in a never-ending class war waged by the rich against America's middle class and Progressive Movement reforms since the days of Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt.
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