CLASS STRUGGLE is part and parcel of civilization. THAT is unavoidable
Every policy in any society that is not flat (ie is not classless) will effect the different classes within that society differently. There is really NO avoiding that reality.
Here's the thing about the term "class WAR".
It is like beauty -- it exists in the eyes of the beholder.
So when exactly does a class struggle really become class war?
Right now. many people in the middle class feel that they have been rode hard and put away wet by the MASTERS. (they're right, of course)
Why the change in attitude?
Previously if you'd asked most middle class people, they wouldn't have even believed there WERE classes in America.
We've recently read people posts here insisting that there are no classes in America, have we not?
REAL class WAR doesn't start until the society openly goes to war based on CLASS.
What the middle and lower classes are facing now is really CLASS BETRAYAL by the MASTERS and their tools.
The masters betrayed the res tof the nation by advincing policies that benefited them, at the expense of their fellow CITIZENS and the nation as a whole.
It's not class WAR...not yet.
Hopefully, not ever.
There is much we can do to pour oil on the troubled waters of this Republic.
But the first thing we have got to do is acknowledge that we are first AMERICANS, and then members of a class within that society that ALSO has rights and RESPONSIBLITIES.
What is the responsibility of the MASTERS? -- to oversee the nations well being. Of late it appears they are abandoning that obligation.
What is the responsibility of the REST OF SOCIETY? -- to obey the laws, to work and to pay taxes, and in time of crises? To send their sons and daughters to war in defence of the ENTIRE NATION.
Well, the lower classes have always done THEIR DUTY.
It's time for the MASTERS to do THEIRS.
Nothing the GOP is advancing is consistent with that premise.
FWIW, very little the DNC is advancing is a whole lot better.
The masters need to remember who made them wealthy. Whose labors they benefitted from, whose children died for them, and who ultimately the nation belongs to. It belongs to ALL OF US
This REPUBLIC belong to the people EN MASSE, not just the wealthy and their loyal tools.
If we continue to fail to recognize this, then the USA is ultimately doomed to become (at best) a third world nation.
Back in 2006, then Senator elect Jim Webb wrote a great op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal.
Class Struggle
BY JIM WEBB
Wednesday, November 15, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
The most important--and unfortunately the least debated--issue in politics today is our society's steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America's top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country. Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to fight our wars. They own most of our stocks, making the stock market an unreliable indicator of the economic health of working people. The top 1% now takes in an astounding 16% of national income, up from 8% in 1980. The tax codes protect them, just as they protect corporate America, through a vast system of loopholes.
Incestuous corporate boards regularly approve compensation packages for chief executives and others that are out of logic's range. As this newspaper has reported, the average CEO of a sizeable corporation makes more than $10 million a year, while the minimum wage for workers amounts to about $10,000 a year, and has not been raised in nearly a decade. When I graduated from college in the 1960s, the average CEO made 20 times what the average worker made. Today, that CEO makes 400 times as much.
In the age of globalization and outsourcing, and with a vast underground labor pool from illegal immigration, the average American worker is seeing a different life and a troubling future. Trickle-down economics didn't happen. Despite the vaunted all-time highs of the stock market, wages and salaries are at all-time lows as a percentage of the national wealth. At the same time, medical costs have risen 73% in the last six years alone. Half of that increase comes from wage-earners' pockets rather than from insurance, and 47 million Americans have no medical insurance at all.
Manufacturing jobs are disappearing. Many earned pension programs have collapsed in the wake of corporate "reorganization." And workers' ability to negotiate their futures has been eviscerated by the twin threats of modern corporate America: If they complain too loudly, their jobs might either be outsourced overseas or given to illegal immigrants.
This ever-widening divide is too often ignored or downplayed by its beneficiaries. A sense of entitlement has set in among elites, bordering on hubris. When I raised this issue with corporate leaders during the recent political campaign, I was met repeatedly with denials, and, from some, an overt lack of concern for those who are falling behind. A troubling arrogance is in the air among the nation's most fortunate. Some shrug off large-scale economic and social dislocations as the inevitable byproducts of the "rough road of capitalism." Others claim that it's the fault of the worker or the public education system, that the average American is simply not up to the international challenge, that our education system fails us, or that our workers have become spoiled by old notions of corporate paternalism.
The politics of the Karl Rove era were designed to distract and divide the very people who would ordinarily be rebelling against the deterioration of their way of life. Working Americans have been repeatedly seduced at the polls by emotional issues such as the predictable mantra of "God, guns, gays, abortion and the flag" while their way of life shifted ineluctably beneath their feet.
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Opinion & Commentary - Wall Street Journal - Wsj.com
