Apr 28, 2011 - Issue 424 |
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Taxing the Rich
is a
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In
most American newspapers and on television and radio outlets (with the
exception of a number of small-circulation magazines), the idea that corporations
and the wealthy in the The vast majority of Americans are bombarded with propaganda that tells them the rich pay their fair share and that giving ever more money to them through tax breaks and subsidies will provide the jobs that are desperately needed by millions of workers. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no good evidence from any economists or economic schools that giving the store away to the rich will provide a single job. They generally do not invest in enterprises that will result in jobs, unless those jobs are created in other countries - the places where they have sent our factories. That doesn’t help the workers in this country and has not done so for more than 40 years. We know by now, from information given out by people across the political and economic spectrum that there is a disparity in wealth, between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of us, which has not existed in nearly a century. That kind of disparity literally makes for a sick society. Poor people do not get the medical care they need. They do not get to educate their children as they should be educated. They live in houses that are substandard and neighborhoods that are not good or are deteriorating. They do not eat well and their children do not eat well. All together, that makes for people who are unhealthy. They get sick and they stay sick. When the society ignores them, it too becomes sick. Without getting too much into the public health implications of these conditions, this puts us in a dangerous situation, as a society and as a nation. Economic and political
analysts and even some rich people have pointed out that such conditions
could be construed as class warfare. That is, the wealthy and Corporate
It may be an unusual thing for Americans to hear, but one of the country’s richest men, Warren Buffett, said of this modern era, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” This, he told Ben Stein, who included it in a column in the New York Times. No one has to tell 20 million unemployed or underemployed workers that there is a class war going on, but they never would know it to read their newspapers and watch television news (forget radio “news”). Everything’s fine, they are told by the newsreaders and pundits…and there is no class war. Also, he said, according to the online Brainy Quotes, “If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end, people like myself, should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it.” Not many of the wealthy 1 percent have been so candid. In fact, to read the papers and to hear pundits on television or to listen to the AM radio chatterers, it is as if Buffett never said such things. Ignoring the class
war in Just this week,
The Daily Gazette, the paper in the “hometown” of General Electric,
The “Schenectady
works” is where Thomas Edison and Charles P. Steinmetz and so many others
did their work and created their electrical inventions and where, at one
time, GE had some 40,000 workers, including engineers, researchers, machinists,
and line workers in their factories. Today, 90 percent of those workers
are gone and GE has moved most of its production to other countries. In
the minds of the bigwigs in Corporate America everywhere, the present
economic condition of So, The Daily
Gazette, perhaps choosing not to offend the memory of the once - great
GE “works” of their fair city, didn’t even want to use their own words
in criticizing Obama. Rather, they reprinted the editorial from The
Lima News ( This nonsense
could be taken directly from a Tea Party newsletter, if there were such
a thing. But then, Both Most people who
can read or afford a television set have to know that if A few of the more candid of the rich, like Buffett, know that there is a class war. They know who started it and they know who is winning it. The newspapers and newsreaders on television can’t seem to express the reality of it. They need a refresher course on Reporting 101. BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union
organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of
The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years
for newspapers in |
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