THE PRIVILEGED ARE REVOLTING IN WISCONSIN
Writing for the Wall Street Journal today, James Taranto edifies the faithful about recent events in Wisconsin. The piece is titled “The Means of Coercion” and, clueless to the double entendre, he ads the tag line “The privileged are revolting in Wisconsin.” True. How True.
Taranto:
To make sense of what's going on in Wisconsin, it helps to understand that the left in America lives in an ideological fantasy world. . . . First, to talk of America in terms of "class" is to speak a foreign language. Outside of university faculties and Marxist fringe groups (but we repeat our self) [sic], Americans do not divide ourselves up by class; rather, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. . . ."
(And if Taranto’s a good boy, the tooth fairy will leave a dollar under his pillow.)
Talk about living in a fantasy world.
Outside the right-wing’s self-serving, impenetrable info-bubble, the language of class division is native.
Class has always been a recurring theme in rap. But then rap is too low-class to command attention in certain quarters, is it not?
Ask a rapper from the projects, facing daunting odds of being killed or imprisoned before he’s 21, whether he understands class division.
Or ask the middle-class family if they understand class after being evicted from the family home by bonus-stuffed bankers whose greed-driven folly created the crisis in the first place.
“All men are created equal . . .”
The only people eager to perpetrate this myth of a classless America, are the upper class and their flacks, desperate to conceal their true Orwellian credo: “All men are created equal, and some are more equal than others.”
It is not for nothing that America exhibits the greatest inequality of wealth among major advanced nations.
In the postwar period before Reagan came along, average incomes in the U.S. grew by $18,605 (2007 dollars).
The richest 10% got 35% of that growth
The bottom 90% shared 65%. OK, we can live with that.
http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/pages/interactive#/?start=1999&end=2007
However, that all changed with Reagan. From the beginning of the Reagan era in 1981 to 2007 (before the bottom fell out in the Panic of 2008), average incomes grew by $18,159.
Instead of a 35% share, the richest 10% captured a whopping 85% of that growth!
The bottom 90% shared just 15% . . . not 65%.
Why?
Did the 10% upper-class suddenly become so much smarter? Work so much harder? Become so much more deserving? I mean, aren’t those the reasons we reward people in classless, merit-based, laissez-faire America? Right?
Or did it have something to do with the upper class contributing millions to the campaign coffers of Washington politicians who then gave billions in tax cuts to their benefactors, their ‘base’?
It gets curiouser and curiouser: separate out the first 7 years of the G.W. Bush era, and you find the richest 10% scooped up 98% (98%!) of the growth in income, leaving 2% for the remaining 90% to divvy up! Keep the change.
How truly smart, hardworking and deserving the upper-class must have become to be entitled to such handsome rewards.
But wait. . . didn’t those smart, hardworking, deserving upper-class worthies run the economy into a ditch in 2008?
And didn’t they bail themselves out first?
In Taranto’s classless, equal-opportunity America, no bad deed goes unrewarded.
The fantasy ends on a reassuring note:
Actual middle-class Americans don't feel put upon by "corporate power" or "the business community," because by and large, they own the means of production: They run businesses; they hold shares in corporations through their investment and retirement accounts. . . .
Well, how comforting.
[NTS: Seriously. Do these guys ever read what they write? Do they engage the clutch?]
So how dumb these actual middle-class owners must be to:
Give top managers huge pay hikes and bonuses, but
Fail to give themselves a real pay increase for 4 decades, despite doubling productivity.
In 1965, CEOs were paid on average 51 times the compensation of the lowest-paid worker (according to the Economic Policy Institute http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/webfeatures_snapshots_20060627/)
By 2005, CEO compensation had shot up to 821 times that of the lowest-paid worker. That’s 16 times what it was. Have CEOs gotten 16 times smarter? 16 times more hardworking? 16 times more deserving than they were 46 years ago?
Meanwhile ABC News reported: “For millions of working Americans, the phenomenon economists call "median wage stagnation" has become a way of life. For decades, their annual incomes have remained virtually the same, leaving many just a paycheck or two from the street.”
And. . . of course, being the good citizens that they are, these actual middle-class Americans “don't feel put upon by ‘corporate power’ or ‘the business community,’ because by and large, they own the means of production.”
[NTS: Is that faux naivetee, plain out-of-touch, or just kissing the soft, fleshy parts?]
Taranto:
“In any case, it seems to have escaped Krugman's and Drum's notice that the Wisconsin dispute has nothing to do with corporations. The unions' antagonist is the state government.”
Ah, the siren song of the tooth fairy.
Anyone who believes it’s about the state budget has all the political acumen of a two-year-old.
The unions have already conceded their willingness to make sacrifices to help solve the budget crisis in Wisconsin. Which, by the way, didn’t become a crisis until Walker gave businesses a nice tax break. Jobs, don’t you know.
Governor Walker wants something infinitely more precious to the workers and valuable to the Republican establishment: the unions’ collective bargaining rights.
He’s demanding this from workers in a state we have to thank for:
The weekend: 5-day workweek, 8-hour day
Unemployment compensation and
Workers’ compensation for job-related injury
In eviscerating the unions, Walker wants to crush the one remaining major source of Democratic-favoring organized money and manpower capable of opposing the Republican corporate juggernaut at election time. If Walker succeeds in Wisconsin, a proud bastion of labor, Republican governors around the country will be jumping on the crush-the-unions bandwagon. Democrats would suffer at the polls.
Make no mistake “It’s not about the budget; it’s about the power,” as Krugman says.
Republicans are repeating in Wisconsin the same revolting stunt they just pulled in Washington: Cut taxes for the rich to widen the deficit, then demand “sacrifice” from the working classes to close the deficit gap. Whatever happened to “We The People”?
Where will it end?
Krugman says the Republicans are moving us toward a “third-world oligarchy.”
Republicans might profitably look in on the Middle East to learn what happens these days to third-world oligarchies.