Mitt Romney - Class Warrior

Mitt Romney wouldn't be the first really rich man to enter the White House.   But, as Robert Reich points out, he'd certainly be a lot different.

America has had hugely wealthy presidents before — think of Teddy Roosevelt and his distant cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt; or John F. Kennedy, beneficiary of father Joe’s fortune.

But here’s the difference. These men were champions of the working class and the poor, and were considered traitors to their own class. Teddy Roosevelt railed against the “malefactors of great wealth,” and he busted up the oil and railroad trusts.

FDR thundered against the “economic royalists,” raised taxes on the wealthy, and gave average working people the right to form unions — along with Social Security, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and a 40-hour workweek.

But Mitt Romney is not a traitor to his class. He is a sponsor of his class. He wants to cut their taxes by $3.7 trillion over the next decade, and hasn’t even specified what “loopholes” he’d close to make up for this gigantic giveaway.

And he wants to cut benefits that almost everyone else relies on — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and housing assistance.

He’s even a warrior for his class, telling his wealthy followers his job isn’t to worry about the “47 percent” of Americans who won’t vote for him, whom he calls “victims” and he berates for not paying federal incomes taxes and taking federal handouts.

...Money means power. Concentrated wealth at the top means extraordinary power at the top. The reason Romney pays a rate of only 14 percent on $13 million of income in 2011 — a lower rate than many in the middle class — is because he exploits a loophole that allows private equity managers to treat their income as capital gains, taxed at only 15 percent.

...So much wealth and power have accumulated at the top of America that our economy and our democracy are seriously threatened. Romney not only represents this problem. He is the living embodiment of it.

It's time Americans busted this myth of the "self-made man" Romney and his clan steadfastly hide behind.   Nobel laureate economist Joe Stiglitz in his recent book, "The Price of Inequality", traces how government policies, not normal market forces, have created the inequality that plagues today's America and has resulted in the undeserved transfer of wealth and power from the middle classes to the richest of the rich.   The government "of the people, by the people, for the people" turned its back on the people, lining its pockets richly in the process.


The frightening thing is that there a great many Americans, especially the prominent and affluent, who don't think this is corrupt.

America's Class War - The Underhanded Battle to Destroy Public Service Unions

In terms of credible American newspaper chains, McClatchey Newspapers (formerly Knight-Ridder) towers above all others.   In the wake of the 9/11 trauma, it alone disputed the Bush regimes lies to justify invading Iraq.  McClatchey lives up to its motto, "Truth to Power."

Another shining example of this comes from the news service's analysis of the public service pension scam being used by radical rightwing US governors to break the backs of public service unions.

...there's simply no evidence that state pensions are the current burden to public finances that their critics claim.

Pension contributions from state and local employers aren't blowing up budgets. They amount to just 2.9 percent of state spending, on average, according to the National Association of State Retirement Administrators. The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College puts the figure a bit higher at 3.8 percent.


Though there's no direct comparison, state and local pension contributions approximate the burden shouldered by private companies. The nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute estimates that retirement funding for private employers amounts to about 3.5 percent of employee compensation.

 Nor are state and local government pension funds broke. They're underfunded, in large measure because — like the investments held in 401(k) plans by American private-sector employees — they sunk along with the entire stock market during the Great Recession of 2007-2009. And like 401(k) plans, the investments made by public-sector pension plans are increasingly on firmer footing as the rising tide on Wall Street lifts all boats.

Boston College researchers project that if the assets in state and local pension plans were frozen tomorrow and there was no more growth in investment returns, there'd still be enough money in most state plans to pay benefits for years to come.

 

What McClatchey has again shown is the compulsive perfidy of today's far right to fabricate narratives intended to frighten and mislead the public enough to permit them to achieve ulterior ends.   This is rank class warfare by plutocrats who will do everything in their power to disguise their campaigns.

Forget Civil Discourse -

David Gergen hit the nail on the head some time ago when he noted that, in today's Right, Richard Nixon would be seen as a Leftie. In several respects Nixon was far more successful than his successor, Ronnie Reagan, even though Reagan never got the opportunity to slaughter as many foreign civilians as RMN. But modern Republicanism has drifted so far to the extreme or lunatic right that the several progressive measures Nixon took would be angrily, furiously denounced.

We have our own little neo-Republican movement here in Canada. In fact it's been the government for the past four years. It doesn't look all that much like its American Idol but, rest assured, that's only because it understands the obvious - that it would be turfed out on its pulpy backside if it pushed its social conservative agenda while still a minority.

One of the first rules of war is that you have to realize when you come under attack. If you don't know you're being attacked then you're not going to fight back and you're pretty much easy meat. The American working public, the wage earners, have been on the losing side in a class war that has been conducted against them since the Reagan era. These three decades have seen the undoing of America's Social Compact. Governments - federal, state, local - have been starved into bankruptcy; workers' payroll tax contributions intended to fund their Social Security have been stolen, misappropriated by the very government that now portrays the contributors as greedy bums; basic infrastructure that always was the lifeblood of America's economy has fallen into ruin; despite impressive increases in productivity, wages have either stagnated or fallen; the nation has switched from a production economy to a consumption economy dependent on a succession of bubbles to craft the illusion of prosperity; and their nation has witnessed a massive transfer of wealth from the blue and white collar classes to the very wealthiest. On each and every one of these battlefields, the wage-earning public has been slaughtered.

The Christian Right has made hay while the Republican sun shines and their latest stunt, the Manhattan Declaration, reveals how easily they transform the religion of love into a cult of hate. From AlterNet:

Religious right leaders are making a concerted push to gain thousands of new signatures for their "Manhattan Declaration," a manifesto released late last year by about 150 conservative Christian leaders. The document, signed by such religious-right heavy-hitters as Focus on the Family eminence James Dobson and Prison Fellowship Ministries leader Chuck Colson, compares pro-choice advocates to eugenicists (and implicitly to Nazis) and equates same-sex marriage with polygamy and a gateway to legalized incest. Its authors promise to defy any law that does not comport with their religious beliefs. Joining the religious right's Protestant leaders as signatories to the declaration are four Roman Catholic bishops, including those presiding over the powerful archdioceses of New York and Washington, DC.

Supporters of legal access to abortion and supporters of physician-assisted suicide are described in the 4,700-word manifesto as "those who today assert a right to kill the unborn, aged and disabled." The declaration goes on to link reproductive rights and death-with-dignity advocates with the early-20th-century eugenicists whose notions fueled the murderous Nazi ideology of genetic purity. From the declaration:

...Eugenic notions such as the doctrine of lebensunwertes Leben ("life unworthy of life") were first advanced in the 1920s by intellectuals in the elite salons of America and Europe. Long buried in ignominy after the horrors of the mid-20th century, they have returned from the grave. The only difference is that now the doctrines of the eugenicists are dressed up in the language of "liberty," "autonomy," and "choice."

In other words, the declaration suggests the only difference between Nazi master-race theorists and today's pro-choice and death-with-dignity advocates is rhetorical.

Similar respect is accorded to same-sex couples and those who support them. The declaration never mentions same-sex relationships without pairing them with polyamorous relationships or incest, a fact reflected in the headline of an Associated Press story (as it appears on Edge, an LGBT Web site) about the declaration: "Evangelicals, Catholics: Gay Marriage Paves the Way to Incest." That, along with the well-documented anti-gay histories of many signers, makes it hard to take seriously the document's assertion that it is "love (not ‘animus') and prudent concern for the common good (not ‘prejudice')" that is motivating the signers' pledge to resist and defy laws that recognize civil marriage equality.

Isn't it time we saw these people for what they are, a genuine threat to our way of life? They're not just odious radicals. They have genuine, mainstream credibility associated with an equally odious and radical mainstream political movement.

My view of these types has hardened considerably over the past few years. I no longer see them as an obnoxious annoyance. Now I see them as a genuine threat, one that must be combatted - openly and vigorously - if we are not to see that same malignancy of intolerance metastasize in our Canada. The American people may have lost their class war but there's no reason we have to do the same.