Class Warfare in America by Bill Moyers, Part 2

Here’s something else [to get mad about]: Caroline Payne’s face and gums are distorted because her Medicaid-financed dentures don’t fit. Because they don’t fit, she is continuously turned down for jobs on account of her appearance. Caroline Payne is one of the people in David Shipler’s new book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America. She was born poor, and in spite of having once owned her own home and having earned a two-year college degree, Caroline Payne has bounced from one poverty-wage job to another all her life, equipped with the will to move up, but not the resources to deal with unexpected and overlapping problems like a mentally handicapped daughter, a broken marriage, a sudden layoff crisis that forced her to sell her few assets, pull up roots and move on. “In the house of the poor,” Shipler writes “…the walls are thin and fragile and troubles seep into one another.”

Here’s something else to get mad about. Two weeks ago, the House of Representatives, the body of Congress owned and operated by the corporate, political, and religious right, approved new tax credits for children. Not for poor children, mind you. But for families earning as much as $309,000 a year — families that already enjoy significant benefits from earlier tax cuts. The editorial page of The Washington Post called this “bad social policy, bad tax policy, and bad fiscal policy. You’d think they’d be embarrassed,” said the Post, “but they’re not.”

And this, too, is something to get mad about. Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington today. Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in any other industrial nation; not the fact that millions of workers are actually making less money today in real dollars than they did twenty years ago; not the fact that working people are putting in longer and longer hours and still falling behind; not the fact that while we have the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44 million Americans — eight out of ten of them in working families — are uninsured and cannot get the basic care they need.

Astonishing as it seems, no one in official Washington seems embarrassed by the fact that the gap between rich and poor is greater than it’s been in 50 years — the worst inequality among all western nations. Or that we are experiencing a shift in poverty. For years it was said those people down there at the bottom were single, jobless mothers. For years they were told work, education, and marriage is how they move up the economic ladder. But poverty is showing up where we didn’t expect it — among families that include two parents, a worker, and a head of the household with more than a high school education. These are the newly poor. Our political, financial and business class expects them to climb out of poverty on an escalator moving downward.

Latest Republican Radical: “The Poor Don’t Pay Enough Taxes”

Jim DeMint, a rising star in the radical Republican firmament, is campaigning for the Senate in South Carolina on a platform that is as extreme as it is hidden.

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 20, 2004; Page A05

In a state that has lost more than 57,000 manufacturing jobs since 2001, many to foreign competition, a resolute message on free trade might be considered problematic for a political candidate.

In the ninth-poorest state in the nation, a candidate who openly worries that the poor are not paying enough taxes could be expected to face a stiff political head wind.

In a state where an already substantial retiree population will surge 19 percent this decade, a politician championing one of the most dramatic Social Security privatization proposals in Washington could expect some problems.

But that politician, Rep. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), has not only gained stature in his quest for the Republican nomination to represent South Carolina in the Senate. He is also now seen by many Republicans as the party’s best shot at snatching that seat from the Democrats in November, when its occupant, Sen. Ernest F. Hollings, retires.

When DeMint faces former governor David Beasley on Tuesday in a runoff for the GOP nomination, he carries with him the hopes of ardent economic conservatives in Washington, who see the three-term congressman as a potential champion. If DeMint triumphs in November, his supporters say, he would embolden all conservatives to push for dramatic changes in Social Security and tax laws, while holding firm on free trade.

“There’s a lot of excitement for DeMint,” said economist Dan Mitchell of the conservative Heritage Foundation, “because he’s not only someone who believes in individual freedoms and the free market, but he would actually fight for them. That’s what’s missing on Capitol Hill.”

The conservative Club for Growth has pumped $500,000 into DeMint’s quest for the nomination, and has pledged to make him a national figure if he prevails.

“This election is about more than Jim DeMint,” said Stephen Moore, the political action committee’s president. “It’s about these core issues of the Republican Party.”

But South Carolinians may see the race differently, largely because hardly any of them know of DeMint’s unorthodox views, said Neal D. Thigpen, a political scientist at Francis Marion University, in Florence, S.C. “He comes across as competent and steady, but he’s no maverick,” said Thigpen, a longtime watcher of South Carolina politics, who had no idea of DeMint’s views on taxes and Social Security. “That’s not what he’s selling, and it’s certainly not the way he’s perceived.”

And DeMint appears to be doing his best to keep it that way.

“That’s not an argument I’m going to win on the campaign trail,” he said of his ideas on taxes.

So we just won’t mention it? We’ll campaign for the US Senate without telling people what we intend to do because if they knew what it was we might not get elected?

So we’ve now reached the point where they’re bragging about keeping their true agenda hidden from the people they’re asking to vote for them. Sweet. Want a little taste of that agenda?

But DeMint’s position on taxes may be his most unorthodox, and the most invisible to his would-be voters, suggested Robert Botsch, a political scientist at the University of South Carolina at Aiken. In speeches and interviews in Washington, DeMint has lamented what he calls “an eleventh-hour crisis in our democracy” — that many of the beneficiaries of federal social welfare largesse pay little or no federal income taxes.

“How can a free nation survive when a majority of its citizens, now dependent on government services, no longer have the incentive to restrain the growth of government?” he asked during a Heritage Foundation lecture in 2001. His prescription? “We must have a new tax code that allows all voters to see and feel the cost of government,” he counseled. “Using the tax code to help low-income workers only disconnects them from the responsibilities of freedom.”

While letting corporations use the tax code to help themselves doesn’t “disconnect them from the responsibilities of freedom”?

What’s remarkable here is the “disconnect” of DeMint from any sort of sane or logical thinking. It’s pure, unadulterated fantasy, and in a state that’s as poor as South Carolina, it’s not a fantasy that’s likely to play very well outside the extremist radcon core.

But under such a plan, those just above the poverty line likely would see a substantial tax increase. That might not go over well in South Carolina, where nearly a third of the population lives on incomes twice the poverty level or less.

So far, DeMint has not pushed the issue. “It’s an intellectual argument, and political reporters don’t want to talk about substance,” he said. “They’d just say DeMint wants to make the poor pay more taxes.”

And, he said, if he wins the nomination, he is not likely to bring it up against his Democratic challenger, state Superintendent of Education Inez Tenenbaum.

No, I just bet he won’t. But she will.

This is what we’re up against–a mindset that thinks we aren’t paying enough and the rich are paying too much. This shows that the so-called “anti-tax” stance of the extreme right is really a “Don’t tax the rich, tax the poor” program: they think taxes are fine as long as they’re not the ones paying them.

I have to keep asking myself, is America really this mean? this selfish? this cruel? this stoopid?

If the DeMints win in November, the answer may be “Yes.”

Class Warfare in America by Bill Moyers

In a recent speech, Bill Moyers summed up a lot of what we’re trying to say here–that a class war has been initiated by the corporate ruling class and the religious right with the aid of the media and politicians across the political spectrum, that this war has been nearly won (he points out later that Warren Buffet thinks it has been won), and that this war has serious, long term and lethal effects on the poor, on the middle class, on the economy, and on our democracy.

He’s right. I said the same things in my first Commentary:

Those of us at the bottom of the income scale are involved in a war. It is not a war of bullets, mortar shells, bombs and tanks, but it is a war just the same, and people are dying. We didn’t start this war. It is not a war with us but a war on us. We didn’t ask for it, we don’t want it, and if we could we’d sue for peace. It is not a war we can win in any final way, ever. We are outgunned, overmatched, and trapped in a swamp. The enemy controls our food, our shelter, our health, and our livelihoods. He rarely shows pity, breaks every truce within hours, and chips away at us every day as if we were emotionless blocks of ice he is hoping to whittle down until we just melt away.

I know this not because, like Mr Moyers, I have studied it, but because I live it. Every day.

It’s a long speech, so I’m going to cut it up into shorter segments and post it over the next few days. Read it at your leisure, but read it and think about it. Those of us on the bottom are just the canaries in the coal mine; this poison gas is going to infect the whole society–if it hasn’t already–and when it does, it won’t just be us who will be dying. As the oligarchs consolidate their power, everybody’s head is going to be on their chopping block.

It is important from time to time to remember that some things are worth getting mad about.

Here’s one: On March 10 of this year, on page B8, with a headline that stretched across all six columns, The New York Times reported that tuition in the city’s elite private schools would hit $26,000 for the coming school year — for kindergarten as well as high school. On the same page, under a two-column headline, Michael Wineraub wrote about a school in nearby Mount Vernon, the first stop out of the Bronx, with a student body that is 97 percent black. It is the poorest school in the town: nine out of ten children qualify for free lunches; one out of 10 lives in a homeless shelter. During black history month this past February, a sixth grader wanted to write a report on Langston Hughes. There were no books on Langston Hughes in the library — no books about the great poet, nor any of his poems. There is only one book in the library on Frederick Douglass. None on Rosa Parks, Josephine Baker, Leontyne Price, or other giants like them in the modern era. In fact, except for a few Newberry Award books the librarian bought with her own money, the library is mostly old books — largely from the 1950s and 60s when the school was all white. A 1960 child’s primer on work begins with a youngster learning how to be a telegraph delivery boy. All the workers in the book — the dry cleaner, the deliveryman, the cleaning lady — are white. There’s a 1967 book about telephones which says: “when you phone you usually dial the number. But on some new phones you can push buttons.” The newest encyclopedia dates from l991, with two volumes — “b” and “r” — missing. There is no card catalog in the library — no index cards or computer.

Something to get mad about.

We need to start talking about this stuff. We need to understand it. Most of all, we need to acknowledge that it’s happening and determine to do something about it.

(Many thanks to Jamison of BiteSoundBite for the link.

And Welcome to Phaedrus, who has officially joined FTT and will be posting here periodically as time and circumstances permit.)