Mitchell Bard: Income Inequality Is the Achilles Heel in the GOP Strategy to Demonize

[Bass v 2.0]

Mitchell Bard: Income Inequality Is the Achilles Heel in the GOP Strategy to Demonize Occupy Wall Street | FierceReason.com

We see it in their approach to Occupy Wall Street. The GOP strategy seems to be that if they can dismiss the protesters as a bunch of crazies (or “human debris,” as the always vile Rush Limbaugh put it), then Americans won’t notice the issues underlying the protest.

In the short term, the Republican strategy will probably work. By highlighting the elements that look and sound the most out of the mainstream, average Americans won’t be able to relate to the protesters and will be wary of being grouped with them.

But what the Republicans are missing is that the anger underneath the Occupy Wall Street protests isn’t limited to the dedicated individuals sleeping in a Lower Manhattan park.

So long as the GOP can frame Occupy Wall Street as an attack on the rich or an attack on capitalism, its appeal will be limited. No matter how tough things are with the U.S. economy, Americans don’t hate rich people. On the contrary, they aspire to be rich people.

But the middle class can’t become wealthy if the government is, through action and inaction, helping the rich get richer while keeping the middle class down, as it has done for the last 30 years (something Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson demonstrate in “Winner-Take-All Politics”).

And Americans have no use for unfairness. They want there to be a correlation between hard work and success. For the financial executives who caused the 2008 financial crisis, there wasn’t even a correlation between success and success. Wall Street bankers made billions of dollars for recklessly devising and selling financial instruments they knew were junk, resulting in a near financial collapse that required a government bailout from the Bush administration.

The government bailout coming from taxpayer money. How can the GOPtards be against the bailouts yet protect and support the rich retards that took the bailout money as being the victims of class warfare?

 

[Bass v 2.0]

GOP=for the rich party.

 

[Stephanie]

OMG, you people and your stupid sayings.

INCOME INEQUALITY..

good gawd, give us a BREAK.

 

[California Girl]

Where is 'income inequality' mentioned in the Constitution? Anyone?

 

[kiwiman127]

OMG, you people and your stupid sayings.

INCOME INEQUALITY..

good gawd, give us a BREAK.

It's a fact and reality.
The GOP is out of touch and I mean really out of touch with Main Street America ala the Middle Class. We have had two new tax proposals and each lowers the taxes of the top percentiles, while raising taxes on those who have seen decades of flat wages despite extremely good profits. More and more of the Middle Class are living check-to-check and the top candidates for the GOP want to make it even tougher for them to survive. And one doesn't think the Middle Class doesn't see this? Every poll shows that people see catering to the the wealthy at the expense of the of the Middle Class. I don't think the Middle Class is quite ready for a Serf Nation!
I sure don't want to see Obama in office after January 20th, 2013, but if the GOP keeps up their submission to Big Money and the Middle Class keeps on being told they have shoulder more responsibility, Obama may actually get a second term.

 

[waltky]

Many who used to feel secure in “middle America” now feel left behind...

Can America survive without its backbone, the middle class?
Tuesday 01 November 2011 - As the gaps within the classes widen, American society is starting to fracture.

My friend J grew up in Chicago, but spent his summers in a small town on a Michigan lake. His family, because they came from the city and because they were “summer” visitors, were slightly more privileged than those who lived in the town. Nevertheless, the town considered itself “middle class” and the children observed no social distinctions playing together. J told me recently that he had been back to that town and found it utterly changed: shops were boarded up, houses were being repossessed, cars were old. He no longer had much in common with people he had known as children, some of whom were now unemployed, all of whom had far lower incomes than he.

J isn’t a hedge-fund manager or a plutocrat, but he is a member of the American upper-middle class, a group which is now sociologically and economically very distinct from the lower-middle class, with different politics, different ambitions and different levels of optimism. Thirty years ago, this wasn’t the case. A worker in a Detroit car factory earned about the same as, say, a small-town dentist, and although they might have different taste in films or furniture, their purchasing power wasn’t radically different. Their children would have been able to play together without feeling as if they came from different planets.

Now they couldn’t. Despite all the loud talk of the “1 per cent” of Americans who, according to a recent study, receive about 17 per cent of the income, a percentage which has more than doubled since 1979, the existence of a very small group of very rich people has never bothered Americans. But the fact that some 20 per cent of Americans now receive some 53 per cent of the income is devastating.

I would argue that the growing divisions within the American middle class are far more important than the gap between the very richest and everybody else. They are important because to be “middle class”, in America, has such positive connotations, and because most Americans think they belong in it. The middle class is the “heartland”, the middle class is the “backbone of the country”. In 1970, Time magazine described middle America as people who “sing the national anthem at football games – and mean it”.

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