Who is waging class warfare?

[ProSense]

Who is waging class warfare?

by Laurence Lewis

President Obama wants to raise taxes on those making a million or more a year, and the Republicans and their media stooges whine about "class warfare." The Republicans kill President Obama's jobs program, but that's not class warfare. And the framing is standard operating procedure. It's standard operating procedure for Republicans to respond to calls for fair taxes by whining about supposed class warfare. It's standard operating procedure for Republicans to do all they can to concentrate more and more wealth and power in the hands of fewer and fewer without anyone calling it what it is. But for a little perspective on the supposed class warfare from the left, we can refer to future Sen. Al Franken's 2003 best-seller Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them:

In her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman writes about a peasant revolt in 1358 that began in the village of St. Leu and spread throughout the Oise Valley. At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of he husband and then killed her.
That is class warfare.

Arguing over the optimum marginal tax rate for the top one percent is not.

Of course, it's not only an outrageous smear for Republicans to accuse those seeking some measure of economic justice as waging class warfare; it's also the very definition of hypocritical. Because in the Post-Industrial Era, it's the Republicans who have been attempting a systematic dismantling of all government protections and services that help the less economically advantaged, while at the same time opposing any similar cuts that might affect the wealthiest, while at the same time continuing to promote government spending that further enriches the wealthiest. But that's not class warfare. Calling for a return to the tax rates of 1950s and 1960s—which saw the blossoming of the middle class, the construction of the national highway system, the expansion of Social Security and the creation of Medicare and Medicaid—is class warfare.

Republicans love to blither about moral values. To Republicans, moral values seem solely and obsessively to be about repressing people's sex drives. To Republicans, moral values don't seem to have anything to do with protecting such other drives as the need to eat and have shelter, much less such extreme luxuries as health care, an education and economic opportunity. To Republicans, moral values don't seem to include social and economic fairness and justice. To Republicans, moral values don't seem to have anything to do with being our neighbors' keepers. Child poverty is nearing an astonishing 25 percent, but to Republicans, that's probably the fault of the children themselves, who apparently didn't choose the right families into which to be born.

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[Lindsay]

1. As a friend of mine said,

and I keep repeating:

They only call it class warfare when we fight back.

[Supersedeas]

4. it was always their war to consume and occupy as much of the econmic pie as we would allow

[Rosa Luxemburg]

2. Republicans want to privatize EVERYTHING - no government

the money goes into the hands of the rich and the rest are cannon fodder for never ending wars.

[silverweb]

3. Exactly right.