This is What Class Warfare Looks Like

 

“It is time for us all
To decide who we are
Do we fight for the right
To a night at the opera now?
Have you asked of yourselves
What's the price you might pay?
Is it simply a game
For rich young boys to play?
The color of the world
Is changing day by day...

Red - the blood of angry men!
Black - the dark of ages past!
Red - a world about to dawn!
Black - the night that ends at last!”
- Les Miserables

Today’s inspirational quote comes from Les Miserables (the musical), an apt source as you will see.

A favorite chant of protestors against Scott Walker’s attack on unions is “this is what democracy looks like.” This fight is not limited to Wisconsin, it is not limited to public-sector unions, it is an attack on all working people. So I say: this is what class warfare looks like.

In 1789 in France, the First Estate (the clergy), owned 10% of the land, paid no taxes, and comprised .039% of the population. The Second Estate (the nobility), owned 25% of the land, paid no taxes, and comprised 1.5% of the population. Meanwhile, the Third Estate (the peasants) comprised 98% of the population and paid all of the taxes. ¹

 

In 2007 in the United States, the top 1% of the population owned 42.7% of the wealth, the next 19% owned 50.3% of the wealth, and the bottom 80% of the population owned a meager 7.0% of the wealth. And for a far more stark picture, the bottom 40% of the population own 0.3% of the wealth.² And after the financial collapse of 2008-2009, the poor have only gotten poorer.

Generally speaking, if you ask someone in this country what social class they belong too, they say the middle class.³ In fact, 59% claim to be ‘upper middle class’ or ‘middle class,’ while only 39% consider themselves to be ‘working class.’

I’ll give everyone a hint: it’s very likely that on the larger scale, you are poor.

Meanwhile, corporations, whose profits have increased by 39% in 2010, pay little to no taxes. In Wisconsin, two-thirds of corporations pay no taxes, and part of our current budget hole is due to the $117 million corporate tax cut passed by the Republicans.⁴

Republicans tend to heavily call for the elimination of ‘death tax,’ their hyped-up name for the inheritance tax. The inheritance tax affects only those who received inheritance over $5 million dollars at the federal level, and only 1.6% of Americans receive more than $100,000.⁵

Taxes have continuously been cut for the wealthy and corporations, more than for the middle class and the poor. The bottom 20% pay 16% of their income in taxes, the next 20% pay 20.5%, the next 20% pay 25.3%, the next 20% pay 28.5%. This makes up the bottom 80% of people.⁶

Now it gets interesting. The next 10% (making around $100k/year), pay 30.2%, the next 5% pay 31.2%, the next 4% pay 31.6%, and the top 1% of the population, taking in an average of $1.3 million a year, pay a 30.8% income tax. You will note that in the top 19% of the population the increase in the percent of income taxed is almost flat, and that the top 1% pay about the same amount of tax as those making $100k, less than what those just below them pay.⁷

Why all these numbers? Why the reference to the French Revolution?

To show a few stark realities: ‘trickle down economics’ is a fraudulent policy that aims at consolidating wealth, the United States is driven by capitalism and not democracy, and that the wealthy have been engaging in class warfare for some time already.

The wealthy, including corporations (which according to law and the Supreme Court are people—wait until they have voting rights), are and have been forming a fascist oligarchy. They only care about profit, their wealth, and their power, and they don’t care what happens to the rest of us.

They have waged a war of propaganda, convincing millions of working-class Americans to support them while they strip away rights and increase the financial burden of the poor. They have slowly broken the unions that built this country to limit organized resistance to their advance.

Deregulation led to the current financial collapse, which affects the poor far more than it affects the wealthy. ‘Trickle down economics’ has led to the rich consolidating and becoming richer while the poor become poorer.

With the wide gap in wealth distribution, the demise of unions, the rising price of food⁸, and the vast expenditures to benefit corporations and the wealthy (labeled as ‘tax cuts,’ not spending), the current situation in the United States reminds me rather much of France in 1789.

The wealthy and the conservatives have been fighting this class war already. Meanwhile, union membership has dropped from 45% of workers in 1950 to 7% today.

Those who are complaining about the benefits and wages of union workers, know this: it is not the unions’ fault, it is yours. You have not organized.

The only way to defeat oligarchy is for the people to fight back. The 80% of this country who are downtrodden and poor need to rise up and declare that the people rule this country, not the wealthy and the corporations.

What we have seen in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Wisconsin, and elsewhere is the realization of people that they hold the power in the social contract. Many of these battles have just begun, and all are far from over.

The wealthy have been waging class warfare for decades, convincing the people that their best interests were served by the wealthy being wealthier.

Now the people have begun to wake up, and it is time for the people to fight.

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¹ http://www.suite101.com/content/the-estates-general-a51288 Retrieved 2011-2-21.
² http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html Retrieved 2011-2-21.
³ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/15/less-than-half-of-america_n_498943.html Retrieved 2011-2-21.
⁴ http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/whats-really-at-stake-in.html Retrieved 2011-2-21.
⁵ http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html Retrieved 2011-2-21.
⁶ ibid.
⁷ ibid.
⁸ http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm Retrieved 2011-2-22.