First, let me get this out of the way -- I have no problems with the rich. I plan on being rich. I'm an American. I believe. We all believe we can get to the top and enjoy the spoils of wealth. We are Americans.
That's never been the issue. And in my lifetime the poor or middle class have never come close to declaring anything other than envy for the rich. But there is a class war going on. It's being conducted by the rich on the middle class in this country.
Again, let's be clear. It's not by all of the rich or even most of the rich. There are great philanthropists among the rich. In fact, over 40 billionaires just pledged to give away half of their money to charity. Bill Gates earned his money, is giving it away and has no interest on declaring war on the middle class.
I'll even give you the classic line -- some of my best friends are rich. So, this isn't about some ridiculous stereotypes or populist demagoguery. This is about stone cold facts.
Some of the wealthiest people in this country have been systematically trying to reduce their own taxes and make sure their companies are not regulated by the government. This makes sense. They want to make more money. But in the process, they have bought our politicians, corrupted our system and ultimately given us enormous income inequality.
This income inequality doesn't seem just, but that isn't my main issue. The real problem is the results of that inequality. It leads to speculative bubbles, crashes, recessions and depressions. It leads to the middle class losing their pensions, having stagnant wages for the last thirty years and lacking opportunity to move up the chain. It kills our economy and ultimately it kills the American Dream.
Here are some numbers on the rich versus the middle class that demonstrate what I'm talking about:
All of the money went to the top. Do you know that between 1979 to 2007 income for the bottom fifth of the country went up by just 16%, but for the top 1% income it went up a staggering 281%?
The rich got much richer. This is not an accident. People like the Walton family and the Koch brothers have been doing this for a long time. The Waltons don't want to pay estate taxes for understandable reasons because they plan to inherit and pass on billions of dollars. It is cost efficient for them to buy our politicians for a couple of thousand dollars in campaign donations. The Koch brothers hate taxes and regulation of their businesses. If you want to know how they have hijacked our system you should read this brilliant article by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker.
Meanwhile, you know what happened to the poverty rate - it went skyrocketing up. Now, one in seven Americans lives in poverty. That's 45 million people. Last year, we had the highest increase in poverty since the government started keeping these numbers in 1959.
The poor are growing, the middle class is shrinking and the rich are getting even richer. This is how you build a Third World country. So, the next time you hear about class warfare, understand which direction it's going in.
Some of the wealthiest people in this country pulled the wool over your eyes and picked your pockets. I don't have anything against the rich and I understand their motivation. But the rest of us are crazy to keep letting it happen. At some point, you have to fight back. Not with pitchforks, but at the very least with your votes.
Now that you know the game that's being played, it's incumbent on you to make sure you join the battle. Help us save this country and rebuild our once great middle class.
Follow Cenk Uygur on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TheYoungTurks
Birute Regine: The Power of Vulnerability
On election day there should be somebody outside distributing pamphlets disclosing in detail how much money each of the candidates received and from whom. That way every voter can have an informed decision on who they are really voting for.
These billionaire families' he names go a lot further than simply buying politicians to cut their taxes, and regulations on their businesses. They also pay to create disinformation and distortions of evidence on matters like climate change, radiation from cell phones, women's reproductive rights, gay rights, etc etc. Look where Islamophobia comes from and you find their American Enterprise Institute a big producer of that disinformation and sponsor of "tools" who are willing to denigrate Muslims so they can manufacture fear amongst US citizens who are susceptible. Shills for these billionaires also bought up media companies the last 20 years so now they have a lock on what gets presented to the public about every issue so the Middle-Class don't have a chance at being fully informed to protect themselves. Gates by the way is def waging class warfare with his charter schools and testing thing to dismember a great public institution that made the middle-class in the early 20th Century.
All these practices are called "antidialogic processes" in Paulo Freire's great 1970 book on this subject "Pedagogy of the Oppressed", and the Supreme Court goes along with it despite "created equal".
This class war is a lot more insidious than Uygur lets on.
http://yourlisten.com/channel/content/61132/Corporate_Person
Copy and paste that to your browser. Should work.
What will it take for them to see the light? Obviously their "news" sources will continue to deceive them as long as they continue to listen. What will it take for them to wake up?
It's all about the Benjamins, isn't it? Does anyone ever stop for a moment in their technology-filled, hyper-consumerism, materialistic, isolated lives and give some thought to what you really want to be spending your time on? Our economy dies when we aren't all out chasing after some dangling carrot that holds the promise of mo' money, mo' stuff, mo' respect. How many people who chase this carrot actually end up grabbing it and how much of their life have they spent chasing it? And when they stop to rest after all that effort are they glad they've spent time they can't get back to reach this carrot? Does it live up to expectations? Was the journey itself fulfilling? And guess who made out like a bandit while you worked your life away for a dream that was not only rigged against you (especially if you are a person of integrity and honesty), but probably wasn't where you really wanted to go in the first place? That top few percent who already had it locked away.
http://kunstler.com/mags_diary16.html
"Business leadership in America has become nothing less than a transparent wholesale shift of wealth by irresponsible boards of directors from the pension funds of longtime employees to the pockets of grifting CEOs -- or the outright looting of supersized enterprises such as Enron. Here's an interesting question-of-the-day for those of you who ponder over business matters: how does a person really improve his standard of living after the first $10 million? Give that some thought, because a few years hence a furious public is going to be asking that very question of fattened corporate executives as they prepare to roast them on spits over the flames of discarded automobile tires."
But don't call 'em welfare recipients.
-- Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (1856-1941)
It seems to me that our leaders are anxious to replace democracy with Corporatist Kleptocracy, all the while railing against "class warfare" as if it's not already being fought and won by the privileged classes. It's like the cheating husband who continually accuses his wife of having an affair.
I see it as no great coincidence that government becomes less and less responsive to the people who elected them than it is to the 2% who hold half the wealth. Then again, I think, therefore I am not a Republican. Or a Tea Partier. But I repeat myself.
Only when the right wing media's negative feedback loop is answered and discredited with facts will this tendency change - but that will require certain people to accept the world as it is, not as they imagine it to be.
Welcome to the New Gilded Age. Please exit the middle class quietly while we dismantle our formerly representative government.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html
The bad news is the working class has no record of fighting back in this country. The last time they did was (I believe) towards the end of the 1800s when the progressive movement began in the midwest. It eventually went on to influence the Republicans and Democrats.
Take more time with it…get up from your key board, go for a walk, sit on a pier, like Thomas Edison did when he was stumped, and remember failure is just the road to solving a problem, because you are discovering what won’t work and this is the process to finding what will work . Discussing a problem is one of the ways of sorting things out and this site provides that in abundance but one of the shortfalls is there comes a time if you don’t start to do something all you do is keep stirring the pot and messing things up till nothing is identifiable anymore, just a miss mash of a stinky brew that looses all identity. You don’t even know what you started out with, so how do you know where to go
The first is there is some much going on in the world today that are so interrelated we can’t keep up with it all, it overwhelms our known mental processes of dealing with so much at one time. Few have the mental capacity to know how to separate them out in small manageable pieces , even then trying so come up with a solution that will not interfere with other problems it daunting for the best of minds, though many times the experts are so focused on the complications of it all it overwhelms the obvious.
Is there a solution to this, I am not sure, but I am sure of one aspect of it all, we all need to give more careful consideration to the things going on around us, think a little deeper don’t be so quick to fire off one liners, think about how your solution might interact with some other problem we may have going on that could be affected by your thoughts on a cure.
Part two
Take more time with it…get up from your key board, go for a walk, sit on a pier, like Thomas Edison did when he was stumped, and remember failure is just the road to solving a problem, because you are discovering what won’t work and this is the process to finding what will work . Discussing a problem is one of the ways of sorting things out and this site provides that in abundance but one of the shortfalls is there comes a time if you don’t start to do something all you do is keep stirring the pot and messing things up till nothing is identifiable anymore, just a miss mash of a stinky brew that looses all identity. You don’t even know what you started out with, so how do you know where to go?
This is a continuation of my discussion of my view of the use of this Huffington Post site, the question I ended with was where do we go, to use the resources wisely and be good stewards of this wonderful resource she has provided us. I also don’t believe you that participate here realize the treasure you have been given… think… you all need to decide how what your purpose in participating here is… are you here for entertainment…are you here to play word gamesmanship or are you here to help solve the problems that surround us. They are not one more important than the other, well sort of … something’s they overlap in sorted ways, but you must define your goal so we all are pulling in the same direction with equal pressure on the tugs… that’s my limit for today … more to come the old Viking
In the '30s depression the rich were suddenly much less rich. Didn't happen this time when we subsidized the rich to make SURE they retained "their share" of the wealth. So they're just as politically powerful as they were if not more so.
So there's not going to be an FDR that breaks through the political dead weight of the day. And frankly, I don't see an FDR style populist/progressive ANYWHERE.
Next there was WWII. Not happening. Just a bunch of treasury sucking brush wars. We're not building anything up, just funneling irreplaceable money to the military industrial complex. And no WWII means no post war period where we're THE exporting super power. Instead we're China's dumping ground.
And god knows no landscape changing new deal type social programs. And no Unity about taking care of Americans in the broadest sense either.
So even if we "commit to rebuilding the middle class" how do we do it? We might as well be on a desert island with a few coconuts for tools. We can "commit to" rebuilding the QEII but it's not gonna happen.