Todd Suomela's Library tagged class-war →  View Popular, Search in Google

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"The Congressional Research Service found that 200,000 millionaires — almost two-thirds of taxpayers with taxable income above $1 million — paid a lower tax rate (combining income and payroll taxes) than the typical taxpayer making less than $100,000."

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"Not everything is included. It's politically imperative not to let Occupy Wall Street become an omnibus container for any and all political sentiments. Not every position should be welcomed, encouraged, or tolerated. How this plays out in the General Assemblies is an effect of the local cultures, the activists involved, the patterns of interaction. In NY, the power dynamics are already reflected upon in discussions and working groups. I expect this is also the case already in the other sites. In the same way that racism, sexism, and homophobia have no place in the movement, it should also be the case that libertarian, capitalist, and financialist attempts to interpret and guide the movement are rejected"

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"One of the major victories of neoliberalism is the eradication of the working-class from the popular consciousness. One of the results of this is the prevalence of the idea among certain sections of the left that the working-class is no longer relevant to understanding power in the modern world - an outdated idea clung to by old-left dinosaurs. This is reflected in the idea of 'the 99%' which has become the slogan of the 'Occupy X' movement, which expresses a very crude understanding of class, where the ruling class are an arbitrarily defined proportion of the wealthiest people in society."

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"Their response to ‘We are the 99 per cent’ has been the snarky claim that ‘We are the 53 per cent’. This line is based on the lame and long-refuted WSJ ‘lucky duckies’ talking point, that low-wage workers ‘pay no income tax’."

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We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.

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"But in fact, "class war" has always been with us. If you ever actually sit down to read what people wrote in times past - for example Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations, or even the Bible - then you know struggle and resentment between social castes was the normal state of human affairs for 6000 years, or much longer. "

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"We cannot have a reasonable debate about class, because cognitive biases such as these are ubiquitous. Successful power structures persist in large part because the way in which power is exercised is hidden from us. The importance of class and the lack of discussion of it are two sides of the same fact."

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in list: Economic Crisis

So let's reframe the question. Should the Average Josephine save more when her government is hell-bent on inflating it's way out of a debt crisis, mirrored by bailing out banks without punishing bankers or bettering regulation and governance?

The answer's simple: are you kidding? Of course not.

Or at least not until bankers agree to have their bonuses taxed at a marginal 99.9% rate, and until both political and financial governance are made radically more open and transparent.

Until then, calls for savings from massively rich old dudes (especially to a generation who's watching its future being eviscerated) are nothing short of a 21st century "let them eat cake".

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in list: Economic Crisis

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The eminent political scientist Robert Dahl once suggested that "a key characteristic of a democracy is the continued responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals." By that standard, contemporary America hardly seems to qualify. While cynics will not be surprised to hear that poor people are less than equal in our political system, even they should be shocked and disturbed by the strength of the empirical evidence suggesting that the views of millions of poor Americans are utterly ignored by their elected representatives.

politics political-science american poverty fairness justice class class-war

As Vidal complained in the same essay for the New York Review of Books, "of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs. Yet such is the vastness of our society and the remoteness of academics and bookchatterers from actual power that those who should be most in this writer's debt have no idea what a useful service he renders us by revealing and, in some ways, betraying his class."

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In his book “America’s Struggle Against Poverty in the Twentieth Century,” James Patterson, a professor of history emeritus at Brown University, writes that “the image of the poor person in the 1930s was the agrarian farmer, down on his luck, but not complaining.” Think of Tom Joad, the protagonist of John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Starting in the mid-1960s, however, that image began to change: poverty –- especially welfare — became seen by many as largely an African-American phenomenon. It was also during this decade that the word “welfare,” which previously did not have a negative connotation, became “a political epithet,” according to Sanford Schram, a professor of social policy at Bryn Mawr College

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Most of the mistakes for which we are paying now, Mr. Black told me, were actually made "by four entities that under conservative economic theory should have exercised effective market discipline -- the appraisers, the originators of the mortgages, the rating agencies, and the investment banking firms that packaged the subprime mortgage-backed securities." Instead of "disciplining" the markets, these private actors "served as the four horsemen of the financial apocalypse, aiding the accounting fraud and inflating the housing bubble." It is they, Mr. Black says, who "turned a crisis into a catastrophe."

Ah, but truth is no ally to a conservative with his back to the wall. So much more helpful are the trusty narratives on which the movement was built. So when we have dispatched this first canard, we learn from other conservatives that it is the sub-prime people who are to blame; that by taking out loans they couldn't possibly pay off, these undesirable borrowers have ruined us all.

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in list: Economic Crisis

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So, if you're an ordinary slob, you haven't had a raise in over 30 years. In fact, your real wage peaked over 30 years ago and it's never recovered.

Productivity and Wages

Productivity and Wages

This would be ok if the US hadn't been getting richer, getting more productive, ever since then, but I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that, well, actually, productivity and whatnot has kept going up. Yet somehow wages didn't.

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in list: Economic Crisis