Income inequality seems to have sprung up as a hot issue in the American elections. With a consummate rent-seeker, Mitt Romney, carrying the Republican banner, America's crippling inequality - income, wealth and opportunity - was bound to bubble to the surface.
Today's American Right (no, they're not conservatives) has reacted like junkyard dogs at the mention of inequality. It sends them howling about "class warfare" and "unearned wealth." We can expect to hear plenty of their growling tonight and for days to come.
Americans are taught to honour their flag, not to spit in church and to recoil in dread and panic at the utterance of the words "class warfare." They're brought up to believe that class warfare = socialism = communism = totalitarianism and the destruction of private property.
But it's helpful to remember that it isn't Mitt's 47% or the entire 99% that are fueling class warfare. In fact they've been on the receiving end of a powerful, divisive and destructive class war launched under Ronald Reagan that continues today. Two years before Barack Obama was elected President, billionaire investor Warren Buffet got to the bottom of it:
“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
And that may just be what this election will be all about - whether Class Warriors like Romney manage to cement the work begun by Ronald Reagan. That's not to say that Obama would make everything right again, he won't. And, if he tried, America's "bought and paid for" Congress in both camps would thwart his efforts.
No, just as the neo-cons knew they needed a seismic event (9/ll) to springboard their perverted supremacist ideology, progressivism may need a similar scale, economic event to coalesce blue and white collar workers in opposition to America's rentier class and the Congress that is in their service. It's really just a matter of when.
2 comments:
This discussion has been rehearsed for weeks with all questions monitored...this is not a true debate about anything only a television spectical to weigh who was the better behaved and who had the better quips. Just a waste of American tax payers money.
I would rather see the US taxpayers waste money on TeeVee spectacles, which may give a glimpse of the candidates, than waste it all on bombs, drones, bombers, nukes, etc. and the rest of the military industrial complex's toys! They could cut back as well on the surveillance of regular taxpaying citizens as well.
I'm with you MOS, it will take a complete breakdown, more than 2007-8. Apparently Americans can lose 40% of their wealth, while assholes like RMoney just get richer and they don't get their back up as long as their plastic works at McDonald's and WallyMart!
What will it take, Benny NuttyYahoo bombing Iran and everybody jumping in (like China, Russia and of course Benny's daddy Uncle Sam) and ten dollar a gallon gas, for the non-radioactive variety.
Maybe things won't re-balance until there's been a major cull of the human herd!
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