Is THIS a message that should resonate with our frustrated and angry Tea Party brothers and sisters?
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For decades, the American middle class has been working harder/harder to get less/less (stagnant wages). Big, moneyed interests have a LOT to gain by pitting working Americans against EACH OTHER, scrabbling over the same, shrinking piece of pie. The more we give in to that, the less we are likely to actually bring economic prosperity back to the American Middle Class, which is what made our country so great in the decades post WWII. Dying middle class = dying American greatness.
Divide and Conquer; convince you that you have to fight for an ever smaller piece of the pie. (robert reich, "The Republican Strategy" (Feb 2011)
"They pit average working Americans against one another, distract attention from the almost unprecedented concentration of wealth and power at the top, and conceal Republican plans to further enlarge and entrench that wealth and power."
Wall St. Record pay when regular Americans facing unemployment, stagnant wages (2/4/2011)--the study is by Wall Street Journal: $135 billion in compensation. Exec payouts = 1/3 of the total Wall St bank bailout ($417billion)
Review: The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett | Books | The Guardian (3/13/2009)
the life-diminishing results of valuing growth above equality in rich societies can be seen all around us. Inequality causes shorter, unhealthier and unhappier lives; it increases the rate of teenage pregnancy, violence, obesity, imprisonment and addiction; it destroys relationships between individuals born in the same society but into different classes; and its function as a driver of consumption depletes the planet's resources.
Wilkinson, a public health researcher of 30 years' standing, has written numerous books and articles on the physical and mental effects of social differentiation. He and Pickett have compiled information from around 200 different sets of data, using reputable sources such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Health Organisation and the US Census, to form a bank of evidence against inequality that is impossible to deny.
Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1% - Vanity Fair (5/2011) 1% of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.
"Executive Excess 2010: Exec Pay and the Great Recession", 9/2010, Institute for Policy Studies
the CEOs who slashed their payrolls the deepest took home 42 percent more compensation than the year’s chief executive pay average for S&P 500 companies.
American workers, by contrast, are taking home less in real weekly wages than they took home in the 1970s
- split the vast middle and working class – pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don’t believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.
The American middle class owes its existence to the fact and threat of union organizing. That is why the attack on public workers' right to collective bargaining is an attack on the middle class
400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer "bailout" of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can't bring yourself to call that a financial coup d'état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true
"Foreclosure Follies" House Republicans have introduced bills to eliminate four federal antiforeclosure programs and replace them with — nothing - NYT Ed, 3/2011
The American Dream that Boehner evokes between tears has never been more threatened. By some measures, social mobility — that is, the ability of people to move up a notch in class — is at an all-time low in this country. Poor Americans now have less than a 5 percent chance of rising to the upper-middle-class within their lifetimes.
At the same time, the gap between the rich and poor, and the concentration of wealth owned by those at the very top, has never been so great. After examining these trends, The Economist wrote that “the United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.”
Numerous studies have shown that what knocks people out of the middle class, or keeps them from ever joining it, is a catastrophic bill or two — usually from getting sick and not having health care. Then, those debts go on credit cards, which leads to a misery hole of high interest and limited choices.
Against this backdrop, Boehner has fought against strivers and strugglers at the lower end, while shilling for ever-more concentrated corporate power and banker control. The one thing that stirs his passion is tax cuts. But nearly half of American households don’t pay any income tax at all, so Boehner’s crusade doesn’t affect them. And a decade of aggressive tax-cutting has done nothing to reverse the woes of everyday working people.
Many of us first noticed his tendency toward tears when he appeared on election night to celebrate his party’s taking control of the House. He had hardly gotten in front of the microphone before things got watery.
“I spent my whole life chasing (sob) the American dream,” he told the cameras. “Put myself through school, working every rotten job there was ...”
The American Dream has had such a bad year. During the campaign, it was tossed around by billionaire candidates who insisted on telling groups of underprivileged children that they, too, could someday own a mega-yacht or run a slimy but extremely profitable health care corporation.
Now, John Boehner is blaming the Dream for making him howl like an abandoned puppy. It’s what my friend Rebecca Traister calls “Boehner doing Masterpiece Theater on the hard life of John Boehner.”
Boehner is opposed to extending unemployment benefits for the jobless, and he wants to kill off the law that guarantees health coverage to all Americans. So you know when he starts weeping when his wife says she’s “real proud” of him, it’s not a sign of softness.
In 2007, he cried while delivering a speech on the floor of the House, in support of funding for the war in Iraq. “After 3,000 of our fellow citizens died at the hands of these terrorists, when are we going to stand up and take them on?” he sobbed.
Then this year, he voted against providing money to take care of our fellow citizens who became ill while doing rescue and reclamation work at ground zero after the terrorist attack.
