08.23.11
Stop coddling the super-rich
My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.
-Warren E. Buffett, chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway (Stop Coddling the Super-Rich, New York Times Op-Ed, August, 14, 2011).
It’s one of the facts of politics that when the GOP starts hollering about class warfare that someone has hit a nerve. Because a couple other facts are that the GOP is the party of wealth, and the biggest sales job in the last 40 years was Reagan getting the working class to vote for the GOP and against their economic best interest.
Jon Perr has more, GOP Decries Class Warfare on the Tragically Rich.
Judging from the furious reaction of some of the gilded-class crowd and their Republican protectors, billionaire Warren Buffett struck a nerve with his plea to Congress to “stop coddling the super-rich.” Former American Express CEO Harvey Golub and Tea Party sugar daddy Charles Koch were quick to protest respectively “the unfair way taxes are collected” and that “my business and non-profit investments are much more beneficial to societal well-being than sending more money to Washington.” Meanwhile, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor attacked President Obama’s “efforts to incite class warfare.”
Of course, a truism of American politics is that the side decrying the class war is the one winning it. And at a time when the federal tax burden is at its lowest in 60 years and income inequality at its highest level in 80, Republicans would still rather wave the unbloodied shirt of class warfare than ask what America’s rich and famous can do for their country.
[…]
The data are clear: lower taxes for America’s so called job-creators don’t mean either faster economic growth or more jobs for Americans.
Democrats must remember how they win, by being the defenders of the social safety net and the middle class. It’s time to act, Let’s ‘Make Them’ End the Great Recession.
Our circumstances are the result of decades of reforms that shifted taxes off the wealthy onto the middle-class under the pretense of “trickle-down” economics. That strategy has proven ineffective and needs to be reversed. Yet, conservative officials gnash their teeth and threaten the global economy at the mere mention of correcting those policy mistakes.
We can no longer allow a hopelessly unreasonable minority in a severely corrupted system to dictate the terms of our economy. MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan has asserted that Obama should abandon our “bought Congress” and begin a dialogue with voters to restore democracy and repair the economy.
Clearly, we can’t sit and wait for Obama to knock on our doors to chat. Our elected leadership will do what it will for as long as we allow it. Indeed, we can’t “make them” fix the economy by asking them to do it. We can only get it to happen by organizing, educating, and mobilizing people from all walks of life to fight for justice in all places where it does not exist, from our nation’s capital to our own neighborhoods.
Further Reading/Watching:
Wall Street aristocracy got $1.2 trillion in secret loans.
Corrupt Obama Administration Pressuring New York Attorney General to Support Mortgage Whitewash.
Companies Sit On Cash; Reluctant To Invest, Hire.
Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?