Who's richer Republicans or Dems??

[Dot Com]

Ok, if thats the case then wouldn't you think that this class warfare stuff is nonsense since Dems are advocating policies that affect themselves the most?

No they want the voting public to think the Republicans are the rich folks, they are lying and spreading hate. They are dividing us in to two groups, rich and poor. They don't want a middle class, they want total control. It's much better for them to make it look like it's all someone elses fault.

Then how do you explain that the dems policies are going after increased taxes on the very rich? That doesn't fit in to your story.

RW's don't let facts get in the way

 

[RDD_1210]

No they want the voting public to think the Republicans are the rich folks, they are lying and spreading hate. They are dividing us in to two groups, rich and poor. They don't want a middle class, they want total control. It's much better for them to make it look like it's all someone elses fault.

Then how do you explain that the dems policies are going after increased taxes on the very rich? That doesn't fit in to your story.

You're not paying attention to the other hand. So if the tax increases on the rich should happen to fail (surprise-NOT), the Evil Rich Republicans are the reason why.

So you're theory is that the proposed tax increases on the wealthy by democrats is actually just a ploy because the dems know that the republicans will shoot it down and thus will make them look bad and then the dems say, we tried but it was the repubs who said no?

Is that what you're saying?

 

[naturegirl]

Then how do you explain that the dems policies are going after increased taxes on the very rich? That doesn't fit in to your story.

You're not paying attention to the other hand. So if the tax increases on the rich should happen to fail (surprise-NOT), the Evil Rich Republicans are the reason why.

So you're theory is that the proposed tax increases on the wealthy by democrats is actually just a ploy because the dems know that the republicans will shoot it down and thus will make them look bad and then the dems say, we tried but it was the repubs who said no?

Is that what you're saying?

Pay attention to the other hand, he's a master of illusion.

 

[RDD_1210]

You're not paying attention to the other hand. So if the tax increases on the rich should happen to fail (surprise-NOT), the Evil Rich Republicans are the reason why.

So you're theory is that the proposed tax increases on the wealthy by democrats is actually just a ploy because the dems know that the republicans will shoot it down and thus will make them look bad and then the dems say, we tried but it was the repubs who said no?

Is that what you're saying?

Pay attention to the other hand, he's a master of illusion.

A simple yes or no is all I was looking for.

 

[Londoner]

The concentration of wealth was strategically covered up.

Read Thomas Frank's "What's The Matter With Kansas". It's about how movement conservatism channels profits into thinks tanks and mass media for the purpose of convincing poor people that the real problem is socialism, i.e., the opposite of concentrated wealth.

How does the GOP get people to believe this stuff?

They use the culture war as a Venus Fly Trap. That is, FIRST they seduce Nixon's white "silent majority" by strategically fomenting backlash against liberal values (abortion, secularism, tolerance, inclusion, etc), THEN, once they suck people in, they scare them into thinking that they cannot trust any "outside" information sources, especially universities with their devil science and carbon dating, or the NYT, with their crazy stories about how Iraq war intelligence was cherry picked. Indeed, once they have them 100% tied to Fox News, CATO, AIE, Limbaugh, Savage, Hannity, O'Reilly, Beck, Coulter, and the lesser news organizations and blogosphere outlets, they tell them that Bin Laden is Hussein, and the media is owned by liberals who hate America, and gay teachers are infecting their kids, and welfare goes to black drug dealing Cadillac driving scammers, and Obama is an illegal alien coming for guns and grandma, and the real problem isn't concentrated wealth, but the opposite: socialism.

Game over.

Nobody will ever tell them that you cannot have a distribution system where all the money is stuck in one place. The American economy is based on mass consumption; therefore, it requires broadly distributed wealth.

FYI: The only way to pull money off the sidelines and get business to invest in jobs is by putting more money in middle class wallets. Business will not invest 1 dime until they have consumers with money to spend.

[/b]Investment requires consumer demand, and demand does not come from low-wage & austerity programs of our current globalizd neoliberalism.[/b]

Government used to ensure demand through a whole range of complex mechanisms, including redistributive tax policy, support for high wages (done through trade laws which made it harder to ship jobs), and subsidies for education/transportation, and anti-trust laws which prevented monopolies from forming over energy, food, and health care, etc. We got rid of all of that in order to give tax cuts to the wealthy. Now the middle class has no money for consumption, and, consequently, the capitalist has no incentive to add jobs. Remember: you need consumers to add jobs.

(Starting in the 80's, there was an organized effort to mislead Americans about the source of middle class purchasing power. We were told that free markets naturally made consumers wealthy enough to consume, but the history of this country shows that consumption was always stimulated by extra-market controls. For instance, consider the Cold War period, when government played an active roll in channeling wealth and resources to the middle class. America had the most well paid, entitlement-fed middle class in history. This resulted in historic levels of demand. Corporations were forced to keep innovating and adding jobs in order to capture all the dollars which government placed in middle class wallets.

(but make no mistake, business was getting restless. They were sick of being tied to expensive American labor. They were sick of their tax obligation to the middle class. So they quietly started investing in the Republican party... And they waited for the right historical moment)

Then, like a gift from God, the GOP had its moment: oil shock & stagflation. BINGO! Sensing opportunity, Reagan, the new mouthpiece of the business owned GOP, convinced us to dismantle everything government did to bolster middle class demand. He said that the money would naturally trickle down from tax cuts, deregulation, and trade liberalization. Now, after 30 years of Reaganomics, the middle class is bankrupt, but the richest Americans have seen unprecedented gains)

So, what do the richest Americans do with their newfound concentrated wealth? They invest some of it into a media bullhorn (to keep conservative voters confused about where all the money went, and who really owns government), and then they put the rest of the money into speculative finance (which makes money from the artificial inflation of securities, derivatives, and various other asset bubbles... which eventually burst, requiring a bailout of the folks who own government: the wealthy private sector. The point of movement conservatism is to convince poor voters that government is controlled by headless bureaucrats rather than the people who destroyed our economy through the criminal mismanagement of risk. The point of movement conservatism is to protect the corporate owners of government through the construction of scapegoats)