Neo-Con Job on Tiny Tim
Reported by Eleanor - June 25, 2004 -
According to Thomas Hartmann in "Scrooge & Marley, Inc. -- The True Conservative Agenda," there is nothing "normal" about a nation having a middle class, even though it is vital to the survival of democracy.
Charles Dickens in "A Christmas Carol" makes the point very well. As Dickens pointed out, Cratchit lived the typical life of that day's English working poor. He couldn't afford medical care for Tim, dooming his son to death or a lifetime of deformity. He had no idea where his Christmas dinner may come from, let along how to get gifts for his children, and always lived on the edge of the terror of unemployment and homelessness. Although he had a full-time job at Scrooge & Marley, Inc., he was so desperately anxious to keep his job that he worked weekends and evenings and put up with years of daily abuse from his employer.
This demonstrates the true liberal/conservative divide. Conservatives believe what business does is business's business, and government should keep its nose out of it, even when it leads to centuries of Tiny Tims and terrified-of-job-loss employees. As the Wall Street Journal noted in 1997, Alan Greenspan sees one of his main jobs as being to maintain a high enough level of "worker insecurity" that employees won't demand pay raises and benefits increases, thus provoking "wage inflation." ("CEO inflation" is fine with the cons.)
Liberals, on the other hand, subscribe to the notions of the founder of today's Democratic Party -- Thomas Jefferson -- that if the government doesn't actively participate in regulating how the game of business is played, the middle class (what in Jefferson's day were the "yeomanry") would vanish.
"Those seeking profits," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government. No other depositories of power have ever yet been found, which did not end in converting to their own profit the earnings of those committed to their charge." As Jefferson realized, with no government "interference" by setting the rules of the game of business and fair taxation, there will be no middle class.
Teddy Roosevelt's advice that, "We must drive the special interests out of politics. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being. There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains." Progressives pushed hard, and in 1907 a law was passed (still on the books) making it illegal for corporations to give money to politicians. It needs to be expanded.
It took the leadership of FDR for government to again take a hand in creating a middle class, this time via industrialized labor instead of land (times change, and we'd taken about all the land we could from the Native Americans).
The Wagner Act of 1935 guaranteed Americans the right to form a union and bargain collectively with their corporate employers. Combined with the later G.I. Bill that sent millions of young men and women to college and technical schools in the late 1940s and early 1950s, not only did America recover its prosperity, but a second great middle class began forming. A middle class that wouldn't have existed without "government interference" in the game of big business. And to stimulate the domestic economy, we instituted progressive taxation, which gave workers more to spend, thus stimulating demand for more goods and services.
Progressive taxation has a long history: As Jefferson said in a 1785 letter to James Madison, "Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise."
But the conservatives -- who since the days when John Adams called working people "the rabble" and Alexander Hamilton suggested they should play no (or only a token) role in government -- fought back. A true middle class represented a threat to the aristocrats and pseudo-aristocrats of America's conservatives. They may have to give up some of their power, and some of the higher end of their wealth may even be "redistributed" - horror of horrors - for schools, parks, libraries, and other things that support a healthy middle-class society but are not needed by the rich who live in a parallel, but separate, world among us.
But history shows that the creation of a middle class requires a modest control of how wealth is distributed. The richest, who benefit the most from our society, pay proportionately more, so the middle class can have home interest deductions, child tax credits, free public education, and health care. Progressive taxation has helped create every middle class in the First World, and without it the middle class will vanish (to Steve Forbes delight, apparently).
But as president, Reagan cut the top tax rate for billionaires from 70 percent to 28 percent, while effectively raising taxes on working people via the payroll tax and using inflation against a non-indexed tax system. It was another hit to the already-beginning-to-shrink middle class, to be followed by more "tax cut" bludgeons during the first three years of the George W. Bush administration.
Nonetheless, a never-ending parade of conservative economists and commentators march through our living rooms daily via radio and TV, assuring us that it is good for American workers to go along with the Wal-Martization of America, accept lower pay and few benefits, and fear for their health, so multinational corporations can "level the playing field" for labor.
But, unless we repeal Taft-Hartley; start enforcing the Sherman act, provide free education for Americans (and not just Iraqis); abandon WTO/GATT and NAFTA; restore progressive taxation (including on dividend income); force corporations to pay their fair share; and go back to selective tariffs to protect domestic industries and stop offshoring to explicitly bring home the ability for us to make our own clothes, furniture, autos, and electronics, the conservatives will have won and the middle class -- and, thus, democracy -- will lose.
If conservative economics are allowed to continue, and we fully revert to the way life was lived by the average person in America in 1890 or Dickens' England (over 40 million in America already have, by the way, many in the past 3 years), there will be no more middle class, just a few more rich CEOs and Bushies, and a lot more terrified workers living in slavery to debt and terrified of unemployment or a serious health crisis.
It'll be a marvelous thing for the profits of the multinationals (including those who supply our "news"), but the end of a way of life in America, and possibly around the world, since so many nations imitate our lead. And only you and I - the ploughman and yeomanry - can stop them and restore an America where it's possible to raise a family on one income and still have enough for housing, transportation, food, education, vacations, health care, and a decent retirement.
The middle class is not a "normal" thing: it's just the core that holds together democracy and an informed, healthy, and active citizenry. To bring it back from its steady decline since the Reagan era is going to take a lot of active work spreading the word (call talk radio, blog, forward this article and similar ones, write a letter to the editor to your local paper), and participation in or contact with elected officials at all levels (writing elected officials, joining and volunteering to help your favorite local political party or activist organization, showing up for rallies, etc.). We must get out the vote and remove the whole con bunch from the White House and Congress, repeal Taft-Hartley, get corporate money and lobbyists out of our governmental processes, restore progressive taxation, rebuild our schools, return to the tariff system that protected American industries (and jobs and communities) from 1786 until 1996, strengthen Social Security, and turn Medicare into a universal single-payer health system (among other things).
Are you willing to join? Or would you prefer to re-read "A Christmas Carol" to your children, so they can understand the future America that conservatives have in mind for them?
Comment: Four more years of neo-con rule and the commonwealth will disappear, replaced by a government of, by and for the corporate elite. It's time we go on the offensive against the "class warfare" that has been foisted upon the middle class since 1980. Right now, we're losing, and many "Cratchits" and "Tiny Tims" have no idea that they can take back the power through the exercise of their vote. That power will disappear if it's not exercised.
Read the entire article at Scrooge & Marley, Inc. -- The True Conservative Agenda by Thom Hartmann
