The Latest Republican Talking Point: Obama Perpetrates Class Warfare

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Thu Oct-16-08 10:46 PM
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The Latest Republican Talking Point: Obama Perpetrates Class Warfare

A few nights ago I listened to Tom Ridge speaking at a McCain rally, talking about Barack Obama�s proposed tax increases on people who make over $250,000 a year. The only thing he had to say about it was �class warfare� and �income redistribution�, which he whined about through his whole speech. McCain repeated the point at the October 15 Presidential debate. And here is an October 10 article from the Washington Times explaining how Democrats, and Obama in particular, are engaging in �class warfare�:

The preferred play of Democrats these days is the �class� card. The Democrats have increasingly tried to redefine the �them vs. us� struggle in terms of class rather than color. As they tell the story, economic prosperity is a zero-sum game. Income gains attained by the �rich� come at the expense of the �poor�. Corporations bestow lavish compensation on executive insiders while cutting salaries, benefits and jobs for hard-working Americans. A massive flow of campaign contributions assures that elected officials will protect and serve the rich, while simultaneously cutting holes in the social safety net. Tax cuts for the rich not only fuel conspicuous indulgence among the elite, but diminish spending on health services, school, and the safety of the poor. Wall Street gains at the expense of Main Street. It all boils down to �them� (the rich) vs. �us� (the poor and middle class). Barack Obama has used the �class card� relentlessly to enlist and energize his supporters.

This is all about Obama making a distinction between his proposed tax policies and those of McCain�s, with respect to who benefits from them. McCain proposes to maintain, and even expand upon the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy � the tax cuts that have increased our national debt by over $500 billion for the past six years in a row, helped to produce the greatest level of income inequality in our country since the Gilded Age, and driven 5 million more Americans into poverty.

In stark contrast, Obama would reverse the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and use the proceeds to reduce our national debt and provide some much needed relief to the poor and the middle class. He has said on this subject:

The Bush tax cuts � people didn't need them, and they weren't even asking for them, and they ought to be relaxed so we can pay for universal health care and other initiatives.� We have to stop pretending that all cuts are equivalent or that all tax increases are the same�. At a time when ordinary families are feeling hit from all sides, the impulse to keep their taxes as low as possible is honorable. What is less honorable is the willingness of the rich to ride this anti-tax sentiment for their own purposes.

A few comments on bashing Democrats for playing the �class card�

The article quoted above from the Washington Times attempts to convince people that Democrats are engaging in �class warfare�, by combining several elements of truth with their standard brand of hyperbole. By starting out with terms like �class card� and �us vs. them� and making the claim that Democrats say that �economic prosperity is a zero sum game�, they hope to thereby dismiss anything that Democrats have to say on the subject.

But no Democrat that I know of has ever said that �economic prosperity is a zero sum game�. That is an extreme position that anyone would be foolish to promote. But the opposite extreme, which is adhered to by right wing ideologues, including the current leaders of the Republican Party, is equally foolish. With respect to the bulk of the Democratic claims enumerated in the Times article:

Many income gains attained by the rich do come at the expense of the poor.

Corporations do bestow lavish compensation on executive insiders while cutting salaries, benefits and jobs for hard-working Americans.

A massive flow of campaign contributions do assure that elected officials will protect and serve the rich, while simultaneously cutting holes in the social safety net.

Tax cuts for the rich do diminish spending on health services, school, and the safety of the poor.

Wall Street gains often do come at the expense of Main Street.

And yes, much of political life in our country today does boil down to efforts by the wealthy to decrease opportunities for the poor and middle class in order to benefit themselves.

To believe otherwise is to shut one�s eyes to reality and to promote the ridiculous and extreme claim that any benefit given to the rich will automatically trickle down to everyone else. So yes, some Democrats (and others) do make all those claims � and thank God they do.

Some historical context on �class warfare�

Class warfare is nothing new. It is as old as human civilization. As long as human civilization has existed, the powerful have striven to maintain their advantages over the powerless. They have done this through a combination of the use and threat of violence, mixed with rationalizations to justify their privileged position. Chief among those rationalizations has been the citing of supernatural forces, including God, gods, or demons.

Jared Diamond, a professor of geography, evolutionary biologist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, writes about how various historical societies have died out, in his �Best Book of the Year�, �Collapse � How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed�. Diamond explains that there are many reasons for societal failures. Chief among these reasons is the over-use of resources, leading to resource depletion. That often occurs when a society�s rulers require the working/productive portion of the population to utilize a highly disproportionate amount of resources for the sole benefit of the ruling elite:

Some people (i.e. the ruling elite) may reason correctly that they can advance their own interests by behavior harmful to other people. Scientists term such behavior �rational� precisely because it employs correct reasoning, even though it may be morally reprehensible. The perpetrators know that they will often get away with their bad behavior, especially if there is no law against it�

Conflict of interest involving rational behavior arises when the interests of the decision-making elite in power clash with the interests of the rest of society. Especially if the elite can insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions, they are likely to do things that profit themselves, regardless of whether those actions hurt everybody else�

Throughout recorded history, actions or inactions by self-absorbed kings, chiefs, and politicians have been a regular cause of societal collapses, including those of the Maya Kings, Greenland Norse chiefs� As a result of lust for power, Easter Island chiefs and Maya kings acted so as to accelerate deforestation rather than to prevent it: their status depended on their putting up bigger statues and monuments than their rivals� That�s a regular problem with competitions for prestige, which are judged on a short time frame�

Significantly, Diamond found not a single example of a society that collapsed because too small a share of resources went to the ruling elite.

Current day Republican explanation for severe income inequality

In the United States in 2001, 1% of the population controlled 38% of the wealth, whereas the bottom 40% owned just 1%. That means that, on average, individuals in the top 1% owned about 1,500 times more wealth than individuals in the bottom 40%. And the policies of the George W. Bush administration have served to widen that wealth inequality much further.

But those are just statistics. The real questions are: Are these extreme degrees of wealth inequality justified, and are good for society? Indeed, today�s right wing Republican ideologues attempt to justify it by implying that it is fair, without actually using the word �fair�. Al Rantel, writing for the right wing magazine NewsMax, puts it like this:

It never occurs to the class warfare specialists that rich people got that way generally because they work hard and take enormous risks.

In other words, low-wage workers don�t work hard. And they carry golden parachutes with them to avoid risk. That�s why they typically make 431 times less money than the CEOs for whom they work.

Some reasons for extreme wealth inequality � or why the rich get richer at the expense of everyone else

Rantel�s statement could just as well be turned around to say: It never occurs to the class warfare specialists on the right that sometimes the rich get richer for reasons other than hard work or taking risks.

The underlying mechanism whereby the wealthy are able to stack the deck of the American economic system in their favor is legalized bribery of the politicians who control our government.

There are now about 35,000 lobbyists in the United States. Corporations pay those lobbyists about $2 billion in salaries and spend another $8 billion to �influence� legislators to help to enact favorable legislation. In many if not most cases, the legislation in question, while benefiting the corporation, will do so at the expense of most everyone else.

Thus there has developed in the United States an unholy and symbiotic alliance between government and corporate power, whereby our government acts in behalf of corporate interests rather than in behalf of our interests, in return for the bribes that keep them in power.

Bill Moyers explains the system in a straight forward manner. He made the following comments during a speaking tour titled �Saving Democracy�, in California in February 2006, and reprinted in his book, �Moyers on Democracy�:

We have lost the ability to call the most basic transaction by its right name. If a baseball player stepping up to home plate were to lean over and hand the umpire a wad of bills before he called the pitch, we�d call that a bribe. But when a real estate developer buys his way into the White House and gets a favorable government ruling that wouldn�t be available to you or me, what do we call that? A �campaign contribution�.

Let�s call it what it is: a bribe.

Let�s now consider some of the specific consequences of this unholy alliance between government and corporate power.

Monopoly
The Sherman Antitrust Act was enacted in 1890 to prevent excessive concentrations of wealth at the expense of the public interest. An article from Cornell University Law School explains the problem with monopolies and trusts:

Trusts and monopolies are concentrations of economic power in the hands of a few. Economists believe that such control injures both individuals and the public because it leads to anticompetitive practices in an effort to obtain or maintain total control. Anticompetitive practices then lead to price controls and diminished individual initiative. These results in turn cause markets to stagnate and depress economic growth.

Monopoly proliferation has probably hurt the American people worst in the telecommunications sector. With the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a very small number of very wealthy corporations began to monopolize our national news media. The result has been a national news media that has sunk to new depths in their failure to inform the American people about the most important issues of the day. To the extent that they are interested in important issues and events, their objectives are primarily to misinform the American people into quietly accepting their efforts to dismember our democracy.

A misinformed people cannot adequately participate in democracy. By misinforming the American people in accordance with their own interests rather than providing accurate and meaningful news in the interests of serving the public, our corporate news media has driven government policy far to the right of where the interests of the people lie.

License to pollute
There are many industrial processes that pollute our air, water, and soil, thereby damaging the health and quality of life of the American people and even causing long term damage to the earth itself. Therefore, the American people have a legitimate interest in regulating such activities.

Right wing ideologues, however, oppose such regulation because it interferes with the �free market� rights of corporations to make profits. Thus we have such proposals as the �Corporate Air Pollution Plan�, which are designed to deregulate air quality standards to increase the profits of the rich, to the detriment of the American people.

The Iraq War
The American people never wanted their country to invade and Occupy Iraq in 2003. Even with an intensive propaganda campaign promoted by the Bush administration, to convince us that we needed to invade Iraq to secure our safety, still barely a half of Americans approved of the Iraq War.

Nor does that war benefit the American people in any way. The so-called �weapons of mass destruction� that served as an excuse for war never existed. We are not spreading democracy to Iraq. Far from helping us combat terrorism, the Iraq War has facilitated the recruitment of more terrorists.

But none of that was the purpose of the war. The purpose was to pursue the imperial ambitions of the Bush/Cheney administration and to enhance the wealth of their cronies. For example, the �trade liberalization laws� made it possible for U.S. corporations to monopolize economic activity in Iraq, and no-bid contracts doled out to Halliburton and other corporations made it possible to steal billions of dollars from Iraq while providing little or no benefit to the Iraqi people.

So, wealthy and powerful corporations benefit immensely from the war, while the American people, their children and their grandchildren foot the bill, thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis die, and Iraq is destroyed.

Favors to the pharmaceutical industry
The U.S. pharmaceutical industry is immensely powerful. As a favor to the pharmaceutical industry, the Bush administration pushed and then signed a Medicare prescription drug plan that specifically prohibited the federal government from bargaining with pharmaceutical companies over the price of drugs. What kind of �free market� policy is that?

The war against medical marijuana use is another good example. Marijuana provides exceptionally good symptomatic relief or treatment for a wide range of medical conditions, for which there is no better or even comparable alternative treatment. Yet the pharmaceutical industry (among others) has lobbied extensively against the legalization of medical marijuana, and the federal government has complied by over-ruling state enacted medical marijuana laws. This adds to the huge profits of the pharmaceutical industry while denying millions of Americans symptomatic relief from serious diseases such as cancer or AIDS.

The prison industry
In recent years, the federal prison system has undergone a good deal of privatization. Consequently, the private prison industry has increased their profits through the use of slave labor, and they have lobbied extensively for more frequent and longer prison sentences, especially related to drugs. That is one reason why our country has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

That is an outrage as far as I�m concerned. Our federal prison system provides a public, not a private service. When corporations are offered the opportunity to profit from a system like this, the potential for abuses, such as violating peoples� Constitutional rights by making them into slaves, is large.

And what right do these corporations have to interfere with our justice system by lobbying for harsher prison sentences � especially where victimless crimes are concerned? Yes, our Constitutional gives all Americans the right to petition Congress. But can�t we make a distinction between petitioning and bribing?

The bottom line � Why American citizens have the moral right to progressive taxation

Thus we see that there are innumerable ways in which the wealthy profit from the decisions of government (the list in this post barely scratches the surface). In fact, some would say that the Bush administration has engaged in class warfare of the rich against the poor and middle class for eight long years. Speaking of Bush administration policies, Peter Dreier notes:

So far, no major politicians or editorial writers have labeled these actions "class warfare," although this is precisely what Bush is engaged in � helping the already rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else. Class warfare is, in fact, the very essence of Bush's tenure in the White House. In thousands of ways, big and small, Bush has promoted the interests of the very rich and the largest corporations. Corporate lobbyists have the run of the White House. Their agenda � tax cuts for the rich and big business, attacks on labor unions, and the weakening of laws protecting consumers, workers and the environment from corporate abuse � is Bush's agenda.

But what about the use of government to protect American consumers and workers by regulating big business, through such policies as requiring worker safety standards, disapproving unsafe drugs, and requiring a specific minimum hourly wage? Do these policies constitute unwarranted interference with the free market? What about the argument that American workers should fend for themselves? What about the argument that if they don�t like the salary that they�re offered or the conditions of their work, they can go find some other place to work?

My answer to those arguments is that the American people have the right to decide these things for themselves. It�s a little bit like coming across a person being mugged and some good Samaritans intervening to help the victim. Should they be accused of some sort of �warfare� against the strong? I think not.

Our own Declaration of Independence makes this point very clear. Specifically it says that all people have the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and that:

Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government�

Thus it is that the document that founded our nation gives the American people the right to elect a man for President of their country, who says that his major priorities are to provide the American people with decent health care, a decent education, and the opportunity for a decent life. And if doing all that and reducing our national debt which hangs over the heads of our children and grandchildren means that the wealthy have to be taxed at a higher rate than they currently are, then that is what he plans to do. It is our government, and we have the moral right to choose such a policy if we think it is the right thing to do. And if right wing ideologues want to call that �class warfare�, then they can leave our country and go somewhere else if they choose to.