[Peace-discuss] Fw: Fighting Back in America's 30-Year Class War

[unionyes]

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Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2009 7:24 PM
Subject: Fighting Back in America's 30-Year Class War


> Fighting Back in America's 30-Year Class War
>
> by Jim Hightower
>
> http://www.creators.com/opinion/jim-hightower.html
> Distributed by Common Dreams
> http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/12-3
>
> David Brooks was upset. You can tell when this
> conservative and rather-professorial columnist for The
> New York Times gets upset, because his words almost sag
> with disappointment - you can practically hear the
> tsk-tsks and the heavy sighs in each paragraph. When
> most commentators on the right see things that offend
> them, they get snarling mad; Brooks gets sad.
>
> What saddened Brother Brooks this time was Barack
> Obama's budget. In a recent column, he noted that the
> $3.6 trillion total is "gargantuan" (we columnists are
> paid to make keen observations like that), but what
> really upset him was that the tax burden to finance
> universal health care, energy independence and other
> big initiatives in Obama's budget "is predicated on a
> class divide."
>
> With heavy sighs, Brooks expressed great despair that
> "no new burdens will fall on 95 percent of the American
> people," adding with a tsk-tsk that "all the costs will
> be borne by the rich and all benefits redistributed
> downward."
>
> Leaving aside the fact that such things as health-care
> coverage for every American and a booming green energy
> economy will benefit the rich as well as the rest of
> us, Brooks' column was echoing a prevalent theme in all
> of the right's attacks on Obama's economic proposals:
> Class War! Indeed, the Times' columnist even suggested
> (sadly) that Obama's budget was fundamentally
> un-American: "The U.S. has never been a society riven
> by class resentment," he sniffed.
>
> Whoa, professor, get a grip! Better yet, get a good
> history book (Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the
> United States" would be an eye-opening place to start).
> While our schools, media and politicians rarely mention
> it, America's history is replete with class rebellions
> against various moneyed elites who act as though
> they're the top dogs and ordinary folks are just a
> bunch of fire hydrants.
>
> Check out the Tenant Uprisings of 1766, Shay's
> Rebellion in the 1780s, the Workingmen's Movement of
> the 1830s ... on into the post-Civil War populist
> movement that confronted the robber barons, the bloody
> labor battles at Haymarket and Homestead in the late
> 1800s, Coxey's Army in 1894, the Bonus March of 1932,
> the Penny Auctions by farmers in the 1920s and '30s,
> the rise of the CIO in the Depression years ...and
> right into modern-day fights involving environmental
> justice, fair trade, women's pay, workplace safety,
> tenant rights, janitors, farmworkers, union-busting,
> bank redlining, consumer gouging, clean elections and
> so forth.
>
> If Brooks & Co. are so isolated as to imagine that our
> citizenry harbors no class resentment, they should go
> to any Chat & Chew Cafe across the land and listen to
> the locals express their innermost feelings about
> today's greedheaded Wall Streeters who wrecked our
> economy for their own enrichment. There is a fury in
> the countryside toward these plutocratic
> purse-snatchers who are being allowed to keep their
> exalted executive positions, draw fat paychecks and get
> trillions of dollars in bailout money from common
> taxpayers. People don't merely resent them, they yearn
> for the legalization of tar-and-feathering!
>
> Yet, Brooks and his political brethren are now
> bemoaning the plight of the plutocrats, assailing the
> "redistributionists" who talk of spreading America's
> wealth. In his column, Brooks cried out for a
> conservative vision of "a nation in which we're all in
> it together - in which burdens are shared broadly,
> rather than simply inflicted on a small minority."
>
> Do we look like we have suckerwrappers around our
> heads? Where were these tender-hearted champions of
> sharing throughout the last 30 years, when that same
> "small minority" was absolutely giddy with
> redistributionist fervor - redistributing upward, that
> is?
>
> With the full support of their political hirelings from
> both parties, this minority created tax dodges, trade
> scams, corporate subsidies, deregulation fantasies,
> financial hustles, de-unionization schemes, bankruptcy
> loopholes and other mechanisms that turned government
> into a redistributionist bulldozer, shoving wealth from
> the workaday majority into their own pockets.
>
> Brooks might have missed this 30-year class war, but
> most folks have been right in the thick of it and are
> not the least bit squeamish about supporting a national
> effort to right those wrongs. After all, even a dog
> knows the difference between being stumbled over - and
> being kicked. (c) 2009 Creators Syndicate
>
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