Originally posted by: cwjerome
Originally posted by: Jhhnn
Originally posted by: cwjerome
Originally posted by: Jhhnn
Class warfare? Ask Warren Buffet-
?There?s class warfare, all right,? Mr. Buffett said, ?but it?s my class, the rich class, that?s making war, and we?re winning.?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11...yourmoney/26every.html
He's not talking about upper middle class people, whom many on the
Right mis-identify as Rich, but about the very few movers and shakers who finance the thinktanks of the
Rightwing, the top .001% of incomes and wealth in this country.
The war isn't waged directly, but rather by proxy, using the emotionally charged touchstone issues of the
Right. It's done by people unknowing, like the Palinites, and by others, the pundits of talk radio and the internet press, who do so quite knowingly.
And it works, until following that pied piper leads to some sort of catastrophe, like our current economic situation. The public is so well conditioned that a fair number will always believe, no matter what, in the simulated rationality presented to them as some sort of honest discourse, as conclusions reached from facts, rather than "facts" assembled to support a predetermined goal...
Are you kidding me? People who make the REALLY big bucks manipulate the system and court government favors like none other... and it has zero to do with "rightwing." You're so paranoid and steeped in your own propaganda its sad really... This whole ultra-rich-bad-conservative-evil-republican mythology is so 1980s. Unless you have facts to back up such partisan hackery, intelligent people will continue to giggle at such nonsense.
Facts?
http://www.mediatransparency.org/funders.php
http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=2182
Those facts don't back up your extreme bias. Nobody argues that super-rich people contribute to "think-tanks." But the reality is, conservatives donate to conservative orgs and liberals donate to liberal orgs. Nobody disputes the fact that the ultra rich seeks taxes and laws that favor them. But the reality is it's done for selfish, pragmatic reasons by mostly apolitical people.
You've got your head shoved so far up your brainwashed hole that you're fighting a phantom... which is why you fail and always will. Manipulated much? Sure, the rich lean conservative, but the super rich top .001% that you talk about don't give a damn about Left, Right, Republican, or Democrat: They only care about maintaining and growing their wealth and government is simply a tool to achieve those ends. As long as you define the problem through the immature lenses of low-grade partisanship you and your silly Liberal pals will be barking up the wrong tree.
You can't even come close to a solution if you don't understand the problem.
It's been a while since I awarded one of these, but the irony of the month award goes there.
The Republican party has since the industrial revolution been the party representing the agenda of the ultra wealthy, with the main partial exception Teddy Roosevelt who was partly progressive. They gave us the 'laissez-faire' capitalism of the late 19th century that gave us the 'robber barons', huge concentrations of wealth and poverty for the masses, the 'gilded age' Mark Twain wrote about and extreme 'corporate rights' including the absurd status as a 'person' to give them excessive rights - which led to the backlash and the progressive movement at the start of the 20th century. The Republicans then abandoned Roosevelt to give us the string of presidents that again 'de-regulated' and explicitly served the wealthy resulting in again huge concentration of wealth and the Great Depression. Which led to the backlash of FDR and the New Deal.
That was such a major disaster other Republicans had limited maneuvering room for decades, while the Republicans sat frustrated unable to 'roll back the clock' to before Social Security, Medicare, and labor rights that had strengthened the middle class while the wealthy had seen the concentration of wealth decline. Until Ronald Reagan, who put into place new terrible policies to help the rich - beginning with his presidency, a course which has led for the first time for the bottom 80% getting none of the nation's growth after inflation for 25 years now, while it all flows to the top - the very top, ad the 80-95% brackets get a little, the top 1% more, but the top 0.01% huge increases in wealth. But they've also learned the importance of dominating the public opinion with a massive propaganda effort, that lhas led the fools like you to fall for the myths that perpetuate support for programs for the most wealthy - which are right-wing programs mostly.
It's not to say that the rich leave the Democratic party alone; no, they have made inroads, and Clinton has a long list, and every Democratic president has some list, of at least compromises made (and in Clinton's case, often active support for the wealthy agenda, after his one big Democratic policy, the small tax increase on the top when he fist took office). There is a battle for the Democratic party between the Democrats representing the corporatocracy and the progressive dems, but at least it's a war, not the sellout party the Republicans are. You are the one confused, cwjerome: you think that assigning 'left-right' to the ultra rich oversimplies the issue, when you have it backwards. The 'right' is about the interests of the rich, and the 'political' views are largely manufactured for the purpose of manipulating enough people into voting for Republicans to get them elected. So it's not that the 'wealthy agenda' is outside the real agenda of Republicans - it's that everything BUT the 'wealthy agenda' is outside the real agenda of the Republican party. The fact that they don't admit to this in their official publications causes you not to notice it; you need to have it handed to you on as silver platter, unable to look at the facts on your own.
You are the horse, cwjerome, that Jhhnn and others can lead to water, and you won't drink.
You're right in one sense - the most wealthy are 'apolitical' in the sense of not usually being concerned with the 'political agenda' of the Republican party. You won't find most of them filling their homes with American flags and making phone calls for the issue of Terry Schiavo. It's about the money for them, and that's why they fund the think tanks whose job it is to lie to the American people and build support for policies bad for the nation but good - at least in the short term - for the wealthy.
The wealthy sort of view the Republicans as their hired help who are supposed to get the riff raff masses to vote for them by pandering, and to pass the 'right' money policies.
That is, the ones who are more informed; others simply adopt some view about why they're right to pursue 'the American dream' of more and not pay much attention to the rest of the nation and the world, 'not their problem', while they are busy either pursuing and/or enjoying money.
Some right-wingers in the 'system' from think tanks to pundits to lobbyists and others understand the 'game' and rationalize it, while profiting; others are oblivious 'true believers' who don't understand the issues but happily champion the propoganda believing it; and still others are cynical. A few sometimes actually pay the price to admit the situation and even switch sides, when the right combination of their conscience and some trigger occur, such as has happened with Kevin Phillips or John Dean.
There's more money to be made serving the rich than fighting them, just as there was more money to be made supporting slavery than fighting it, so it lasted for centuries.
The enemy of the wealthy getting away with this is society forming some collective opinion to stand against it - and the way to defeat the public doing that is to split them in halves opposing one another, which is exactly what you see with the polarization of the country into 'blue and red' over any issue that wil serve to do it and even more basically as people strongly identify with one side and against the other. It's very effective as you see the result when people here even try to discuss the issues of wealth.
"Class warfare!!!!!!" the suckers scream, as if those two words alone were a rebuttal to the facts of wealth issues, a name-calling that shows the poster to be some crazy Marxist.
So, you have it exactly backwards in your chastising Jhhnn, who is pointing out the actual situation, while you ironically don't notice it's you not understanding 'the game'.
As long as the American people behave like you do and you encourage, they'll lose the 'class war' and be worse off.
What we need is a world approach to the liberal policy of economic policies that combine high growth, through wealth being available for incenting the masses instead of locked up in the pockets of the wealthy owning everything and all the profits, with some social justice of broad prosperity, not extreme concentration of wealth - and not 'the same for everyone' eithers, but rather moderate concentration of wealth.
The reality of the world is that a small percentage of people are more motivated, more talented and more gifted than the rest. They are the ones who produce meaningful change, progress and wealth. No matter what system you come up with, those who are more productive will end up owning a significant share of the wealth (as they should). Any system that does not allow that to happen will result in poverty for all (welcome to communism). All men are not created equal, they should just have equal opportunities.
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