The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class -- pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don't believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.
By splitting working America along these lines, Republicans want Americans to believe that we can no longer afford to do what we need to do as a nation. They hope to deflect attention from the increasing share of total income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent while the jobs and wages of everyone else languish.
Republicans would rather no one notice their campaign to shrink the pie even further with additional tax cuts for the rich -- making the Bush tax cuts permanent, further reducing the estate tax, and allowing the wealthy to shift ever more of their income into capital gains taxed at 15 percent.
The strategy has three parts.
The Battle Over the Federal Budget
The first is being played out in the budget battle in Washington. As they raise the alarm over deficit spending and simultaneously squeeze popular middle-class programs, Republicans want the majority of the American public to view it all as a giant zero-sum game among average Americans that some will have to lose.
The president has already fallen into the trap by calling for budget cuts in programs the poor and working class depend on -- assistance with home heating, community services, college loans, and the like.
In the coming showdown over Medicare and Social Security, House budget chair Paul Ryan will push a voucher system for Medicare and a partly-privatized plan for Social Security -- both designed to attract younger middle-class voters.
The Assault on Public Employees
The second part of the Republican strategy is being played out on the state level where public employees are being blamed for state budget crises. Unions didn't cause these budget crises -- state revenues dropped because of the Great Recession -- but Republicans view them as opportunities to gut public employee unions, starting with teachers.
Wisconsin's Republican governor Scott Walker and his GOP legislature are seeking to end almost all union rights for teachers. Ohio's Republican governor John Kasich is pushing a similar plan in Ohio through a Republican-dominated legislature. New Jersey's Republican governor Chris Christie is attempting the same, telling a conservative conference Wednesday, "I'm attacking the leadership of the union because they're greedy, and they're selfish and they're self-interested."
The demonizing of public employees is not only based on the lie that they've caused these budget crises, but it's also premised on a second lie: that public employees earn more than private-sector workers. They don't, when you take account of their education. In fact over the last fifteen years the pay of public-sector workers, including teachers, has dropped relative to private-sector employees with the same level of education -- even including health and retirement benefits. Moreover, most public employees don't have generous pensions. After a career with annual pay averaging less than $45,000, the typical newly-retired public employee receives a pension of $19,000 a year.
Bargaining rights for public employees haven't caused state deficits to explode. Some states that deny their employees bargaining rights, such as Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona, are running big deficits of over 30 percent of spending. Many states that give employees bargaining rights -- Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Montana -- have small deficits of less than 10 percent.
Republicans would rather go after teachers and other public employees than have us look at the pay of Wall Street traders, private-equity managers, and heads of hedge funds -- many of whom wouldn't have their jobs today were it not for the giant taxpayer-supported bailout, and most of whose lending and investing practices were the proximate cause of the Great Depression to begin with.
Last year, America's top thirteen hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion each. One of them took home $5 billion. Much of their income is taxed as capital gains -- at 15 percent -- due to a tax loophole that Republican members of Congress have steadfastly guarded.
If the earnings of those thirteen hedge-fund managers were taxed as ordinary income, the revenues generated would pay the salaries and benefits of 300,000 teachers. Who is more valuable to our society -- thirteen hedge-fund managers or 300,000 teachers? Let's make the question even simpler. Who is more valuable: One hedge fund manager or one teacher?
The Distortion of the Constitution
The third part of the Republican strategy is being played out in the Supreme Court. It has politicized the Court more than at any time in recent memory.
Last year a majority of the justices determined that corporations have a right under the First Amendment to provide unlimited amounts of money to political candidates. Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission is among the most patently political and legally grotesque decisions of our highest court -- ranking right up there with Bush vs. Gore and Dred Scott.
Among those who voted in the affirmative were Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Both have become active strategists in the Republican party.
A month ago, for example, Antonin Scalia met in a closed-door session with Michele Bachmann's Tea Party caucus -- something no justice concerned about maintaining the appearance of impartiality would ever have done.
Both Thomas and Scalia have participated in political retreats organized and hosted by multi-billionaire financier Charles Koch, a major contributor to the Tea Party and other conservative organizations, and a crusader for ending all limits on money in politics. (Not incidentally, Thomas's wife is the founder of Liberty Central, a Tea Party organization that has been receiving unlimited corporate contributions due to the Citizens United decision. On his obligatory financial disclosure filings, Thomas has repeatedly failed to list her sources of income over the last twenty years, nor even to include his own four-day retreats courtesy of Charles Koch.)
Some time this year or next, the Supreme Court will be asked to consider whether the nation's new health care law is constitutional. Watch your wallets.
The Strategy as a Whole
These three aspects of the Republican strategy -- a federal budget battle to shrink government, focused on programs the vast middle class depends on; state efforts to undermine public employees, whom the middle class depends on; and a Supreme Court dedicated to bending the Constitution to enlarge and entrench the political power of the wealthy -- fit perfectly together.
They pit average working Americans against one another, distract attention from the almost unprecedented concentration of wealth and power at the top, and conceal Republican plans to further enlarge and entrench that wealth and power.
What is the Democratic strategy to counter this and reclaim America for the rest of us?
Correction: An earlier version of this post erroneously stated that the revenues generated from the top 13 hedge-fund managers would pay the salaries and benefits of 5 million teachers. This typo has been corrected in the post.
Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.
Follow Robert Reich on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RBReich
George Lakoff: What Conservatives Really Want
Jim Wallis: This is Not Fiscal Conservatism. It's Just Politics.
Rev. Chuck Currie: House GOP Cuts are Theologically Immoral
Robert Creamer: Wisconsin Governor's Attack on Labor May Backfire on Radical Right
I own a small business of twenty years. I am told by the banks "No" you cannot have a small loan to help grow your business. I am told "No" you cannot keep your Corporate Credit Card interest rate of 10.9% and now will be charged 17.45% and was told by a Capital One senior account manager, and I quote, "We are a business too and we need to make a profit. It was a tough decision we had to make but we raised ALL Corporate rates on small businesses to 17.45%".
This war as you describe is real. It is being waged on every conceivable front. And we the working are showing up every day to do this country's hard work with a target on our back.
This economic crisis provided the smokescreen to transfer huge sums of wealth from public to private hands in 2008 through the TARP bailout. It will now serve as the smokescreen to transfer the public institutions behind that wealth into private hands. The end game is to do away with public workers entirely (remember the de-baathification policies of Paul Bremer in Iraq) and replace them with -- ta-dah! -- private employees.
Corporations are desperate to expand their services beyond private correction services, highway construction & highway maintenance through private toll booths, and military sub-contracting. They want it all -- think about it.
Private schools, private government services... from DMV to policing to fire safety to sewer and water procurement/delivery. Why pay lobbyists to influence politicians? Why pay politicians to do your bidding? Why fight with unions? Get rid of the middleman; get rid of barriers to progress. Buy the government outright.
They get the smartest people for the job when they hire. Just like teachers. They don't try to find the most unfit, disconnected, unhumane person with a degree. There are so few teaching jobs I have to believe they are getting the best of the best. It is just a ploy when they say they are "overpaid."
Those that believe that rhetoric are just begging "pay me less too!" "I am worthless because you say so!"
Until the entire middle class sees that our survival depends upon transcending differences in union vs. non-union, black vs. white vs. Asian, educated vs. not, straight vs. gay, we'll remain divided and powerless to stop the plunder of our country's wealth by the rapacious, criminal oligarchy.
That is politicians against the people.
If there are such people out there, people independent of either party, who are true Liberals, not just on social issues but on the economy as well these are the people we need to fight to put into office. We also need to get the truth out there. Fox and right wing radio have 24/7 access to the least educated and least intelligent in this country. We need to get the truth out there.
Post links to Mr. Reich's article on your FB page and Twitter. We don't have the billions the right and top 2% have to spread their lies and play all the different segments of the other 98% of us against each other. All we have (at least for now) is our online and offline voice. Get out there and spread the truth. If you get even one person to know the truth that person will get someone else to know it.
All of us, union, non union, workers, unemployed, middle class, poor, all races and religions getting together to spread the truth is the only fear those at the top have and it's the only way we will ever win back our country from them.
Because some Wisconsin Democratic legislators temporarily "jump ship" in order to prevent a vote to bust public employees unions, doesn't impress me very much. - And it won't, as long as corporate America and the wealthy continue to fund the elections of members on both sides of the aisle, and offer these six figure wage earners seven figures as lobbyists after they leave office, both houses remain corrupt, and not fit to serve THE PEOPLE.
1) The Bush tax cuts are primarily for rich people. You are right that a little bit trickles down to the average joe but lets face it, it doesnt help us nearly as much as it does say, corporate owners, traders, and bankers. Its sad to see that you are still so blind to what is painfully obvious to a fourth grader.
2) Your argument here is the President created the problem between the black professor and the white police officer and this links somehow to divisiveness. Not seeing it. However I do see teabaggers such as Bachmann and Palin as well as their corporate sponsors of, yes, NewsCorps (FoxNews), promoting as much derision as possible in an effort to blind the non-informed as to the right wing fascist agenda. More money to the ivy league and less money to joe sixpack.
3) By any standard this isnt the worst recession? Whose standards? Dick Cheney? Trump? I'll agree with you that it was forced upon us by ridiculous spending but the healthcare bill that has barely taken affect? How 'bout fueling two wars for ten years on a SECRET budget? Or maybe giving away free money to the rich and calling it "fair market value"? Or screwing the little guy for one more sacrifice while the rich buy another condo in Europe and bury more money overseas in order to STAY RICH.
Thanks for playing.
Per SF Chronicle: "...Their demand comes as UC is trying to eliminate a vast, $21.6 billion unfunded pension obligation by reducing benefits for future employees, raising the retirement age, requiring employees to pay more into UC's pension fund and boosting tuition...
...The executives say the higher pensions are overdue because the regents agreed in 1999 to grant them once the Internal Revenue Service allowed them to lift the $245,000 cap, a courtesy often granted to tax-exempt institutions like UC. The IRS approved the waiver in 2007.
(UC President) Yudof wants the regents to rescind their original approval of the higher pensions, but withdrew his recommendation after receiving the letter..."
San Francisco Chronicle story: http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-12-29/news/26349177_1_uc-employees-uc-system-higher-pensions
PDF of the letter: http://www.sfgate.com/c/acrobat/2010/12/30/regents-12-10-exec-pensions.pdf "