With all the accusations by the American oligarchy and their supporters flying around, of “class warfare” perpetrated against
them, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that our country (and most if not all other countries as well) has always been characterized by class warfare – but not in the way that the American oligarchy would have us believe. As Warren Buffet
famously acknowledged, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning”
There is perhaps no better proof of the truth of that statement than the fact that, as the American oligarchy exerted more and more influence over our nation’s political processes over the last three decades, the
wealth gap in the United States expanded to its greatest heights ever, so that one third of our country’s wealth is now held by 1% of households while the bottom 80% owns less than half of what those fortunate 1% own. The truth of Buffet’s statement is also evident in the fact that by 2006: 46 million Americans were
without health insurance, which results in thousands of premature deaths every year, including
thousands of infants; approximately 7 million Americans who wanted jobs were
unemployed; 12% of Americans
could not put food on the table at least part of the year; as many as 3.5 million Americans were
homeless in any given year; and 37 million Americans were in poverty, while the poverty rate
continued to rise.
Oh yes, I’m well aware that the American oligarchy, their supporters in the corporate owned media, and the politicians they pay to pass favorable legislation for them have an answer to this: They want us to believe that so many millions of Americans are hungry, homeless and without a job because they choose not to work for these things. They want us to believe that there are enough jobs in this country to enable everyone to make a livable wage if only they weren’t so lazy. Presumably American children who live in poverty are to blame as well.
It turns my stomach to see these people appear on national television and tell us that we need to cut taxes for billionaires or further cut regulations designed to curb pollution or the fraud of our financial industry, because it is our billionaires and corporate titans who have the initiative and ability to create jobs for us and make our country prosperous – if only we cut their taxes and stop regulating their activities. So what is their response when we ask them why our economy became mired in its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and our national debt skyrocketed following the
Bush tax cuts for rich? They have only one response to that: an accusation of “Class Warfare!!”
Americans need to face a very fundamental question: Is the great wealth gap and accompanying shrinkage of the middle class and accelerating poverty rates in our country due to the fact that most Americans lack the work ethic, intelligence, or other virtues possessed by the American oligarchy? Or is it due to the fact that the wealthy have bribed our elected officials into passing more and more legislation favorable to their interests – in other words, to create a stacked deck in their favor?
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON CLASS WARFARE IN OUR COUNTRYA look at the history of class warfare in our country can provide us with needed perspective on this question:
The Gilded age and early labor movement in the United StatesThe
Gilded Age encompasses the period of United States History from roughly 1865 to 1901. It was characterized by rapid industrialization and a great widening of the income gap between the rich and the poor. The term “
robber baron” was used to characterize some of the leading industrialists of this period, who were described by Thorstein Veblen in “
The Theory of the Leisure Class” as being “not different from a barbarian because he uses brute force, cunning and competitive skills to make money from others, and then lives off the spoils of conquests rather than producing things himself.”
James Green, in his book, “
Death in the Haymarket – A story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America”, describes in detail some of the early struggles of the labor movement in the United States. With the onset of the industrial age, working people in the United States had it very rough. They often worked very hard, under very bad physical conditions, for very little money, and for so many hours that they had very little time for leisure or to spend with their families.
Labor unions began to form as a response to these conditions. One of the main goals of the labor movement was the establishment of the 8 hour working day. Industry vigorously resisted this, and they were greatly assisted in this resistance by the leading newspapers of the time, as well as the powers of government. Yet, the labor movement persisted, and through organization, political activity, strikes, and demonstrations meant to appeal to the American masses, by the end of April 1886, it appeared to be on the verge of winning substantial concessions. On May 1, 1886, a general strike began, with its most intense activity in Chicago. By the afternoon of May 3, several employers had granted major concessions to the labor unions, and the situation was looking bright for them. Then about 200 police officers attacked strikers at the McCormick plant in Chicago, with clubs and guns, resulting in six dead strikers.
Rather than quelling the strikes, the deaths at the McCormick plant infuriated the workers, who responded by gathering together for numerous meetings, where angry and violent rhetoric was spoken. The strikes continued on May 4.
The bombing at Haymarket Square Green describes the bombing in Haymarket Square and its sequelae: On the evening of May 5, a protest rally was held in Haymarket Square, Chicago, with about 3,000 people attending. By 10:20 p.m., bad weather had caused many people to leave, and only about 500 remained. As the meeting was winding down, police entered the square and commanded the crowd to disperse. The speaker, Samuel Fielden, briefly argued with the police, claiming that the rally was peaceable, but relented after further insistence by the police. Fielden then began to climb down from his platform. At that moment a grenade was thrown, landed on the ground, and exploded. There is controversy about what followed, but most of the witnesses who were not bribed or threatened or tortured into giving specific testimony said that the gunfire which followed the explosion of the grenade came entirely or almost entirely from the police. By the end of the mayhem that followed the exploded grenade, three civilians and seven police officers were dead or lay dying.
The “terrorist attack” set off hysteria throughout the country, but especially in Chicago. The hysteria was occasioned by the fact that the use of bombs for such a purpose was not previously known, and there was a belief that this could auger in an era where police were defenseless against terrorists who chose to fight by methods such as this. In the following days many of the leaders of the labor movement in Chicago were rounded up and held for interrogation. Eight of them were indicted on conspiracy to commit murder. These eight men were mostly anarchists, Communists, or socialists, and all of them were immigrants to the United States.
The trial of the eight men became one of the most controversial trials in American history because of its many irregularities. In the first place, people were admitted to the jury only if they expressed prejudice against the defendants. The person who threw the bomb was neither identified nor charged, and indeed many people suspected that it was thrown by someone whose motivation was to cast a cloud over and destroy the labor movement. Furthermore, it was made clear to the jury that the defendants were being tried on the basis of their political beliefs rather than on the basis of their relationship to the specific events of May 5th. The prosecutor put it like this in his charge to the jury:
America… might be in danger, for … anarchy is possible… There is but one step from republicanism to anarchy… Freeing the anarchists would mean taking that step… If the jurymen unjustly acquit the anarchists, their followers would flock out again like a lot of rats and vermin.
And the judge agreed, instructing the jury that they could find the men guilty of murder even if the crime was committed by someone who was not charged. 7 of the 8 men were found guilty of murder and sentenced to be hung, while the 8th was sentenced to 15 years in prison. A sympathetic governor later commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment for 2 of the 7 men who were sentenced to hang, refusing to do so for the remaining 5 because they refused to ask for mercy, on the grounds that they maintained their innocence. One man committed suicide, and four were hung to death. A new mayor eventually pardoned the remaining three, based on the paucity of evidence against the defendants, the numerous irregularities of the trial and the finding that most of the witnesses for the prosecution had been either bribed, threatened, or tortured into testifying against the defendants.
The use of fear and repression to fight the labor movement The hysteria and fear occasioned by the “terrorism” unleashed at Haymarket Square led to aggressive suppression of the labor movement in the following years, very possibly setting back the labor movement in the United States by decades. By the first decades of the 20th Century, the United States was in the midst of such a Red scare that Eugene Debs, perennial Socialist candidate for President of the United States, was
repeatedly imprisoned for speaking out about his beliefs.
An overall idea of the violence involved in conflicts between labor and employers in the United States is provided by the historian Richard Hofstadter, writing in 1970.
Hofstadter observed that the United States had experienced at least 160 instances in which state or federal troops had intervened in strikes, and at least 700 labor disputes in which deaths were recorded, with most of the violence being perpetrated by state or federal authorities. He concluded:
The greatest and most calculating of killers is the national state, and this is true not only in international wars, but in domestic conflicts.
Early 20th Century Eventually, reaction set in against the robber barons, and measures were taken to reduce income and power disparities in America. Landmark measures included the
Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890, President Theodore Roosevelt’s
vigorous enforcement of anti-trust legislation during his Presidency, the
16th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913 (which allowed the graduated income tax), the
Clayton Anti-trust Act of 1914 and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Finally, Congress mandated the eight hour working day with the
Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
But the 1920s saw a succession of three very fiscally conservative Republican presidents (Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover), during which
income disparity in our country expanded back to Gilded Age proportions – with the top 1% of individuals accounting for 17% of annual income and the top 10% accounting for 44% of annual income (and that’s not even counting income from capital gains). This culminated in the
Stock Market Crash of 1929, which was followed by the Great Depression – the worst economic depression in U.S. history – leading in turn to the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as President.
FDR’s counteroffensiveFDR’s recognition of class warfare perpetrated by the American oligarchy against the American peopleFDR aggressively criticized the conditions that led to this state of affairs in his
1936 Democratic Convention speech to the American people. In that speech he condemned the men who were responsible for the nation’s economic woes, whom he referred to as “Economic Royalists”.
Out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital … the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service. There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit.
The privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.
The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor – these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small business man, the investments set aside for old age – other people's money – these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.
The coup and assassination attempt against FDR – talking of class warfareBecause of the threat that his election posed to powerful interests, an
assassination and military coup was attempted against FDR shortly after he assumed the presidency. Lonnie Wolfe explains the motivation behind that attempt, from the viewpoint of the financial forces that wielded so much power in our country:
During this century, no President had dared to challenge the power of this financial cabal. However, FDR, with his mandate from the American people, is now in a position to do so… FDR has made clear his understanding of the use of the power of the executive branch of government to shape policy initiatives, and to mobilize support for them… He could take away power from the financial oligarchy, the Morgan-Mellon led cabal, restoring a balance between financial and industrial capital.
As 1932 became 1933, Morgan's spies learned that Roosevelt might be considering more radical measures, ones that could take control of America's most precious commodity – its sovereign credit – away from Wall Street and the London-based financial oligarchy… American credit, and therefore government economic policy, had been held under the thumb of the private financial markets and their banking houses, like Morgan. Should a President Roosevelt seize control of the nation's credit, and deploy it for a recovery program based not upon continued bankers' looting, but on economic development, and should he rally the American people to that program, the power of the London-based financial oligarchs might be broken.
With their power thus threatened, the financial oligarchs were ready to choose radical action: Roosevelt had to be eliminated, and the institution of the Presidency destroyed or weakened. Thus was set in motion here in the U.S. a series of actions… that would have led to the American equivalent of the Hitler coup.
Fortunately for the American people, the assassination and coup attempts failed. The assassination attempt occurred shortly before FDR took office, on February 15, 1933. The would-be-assassin missed FDR but hit five other people when a woman in the crowd deflected his arm as he made his attempts. The continuing coup plans were publicly exposed on November 17, 1934, in two U.S. newspapers, three days before Major General Smedley Butler testified to Congress about the plot.
FDR knew that his economic policies were extremely threatening to powerful economic interests, whose hatred they incurred. And
he welcomed their hatred, as demonstrated in his speech on the eve of the 1936 presidential election:
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.
The New DealThe abuses of power that FDR detailed in that speech provided much of the rationale for his
New Deal, which substantially reversed income inequality for the first time in U.S. history, lifted tens of millions of Americans out of poverty and created a vibrant middle class, while
taxing corporations at unprecedented levels. Some components of the New Deal included: Progressive taxation, with
record income tax rates exceeding 90% on wealthy corporations and individuals;
labor protection laws; and several policies to provide a social safety net for Americans and otherwise reduce income inequality, including the
Social Security Act of 1935, the
GI Bill of Rights, and the development of several policies to facilitate
job creation.
FDR’s Second Bill of Rights Cass Sunstein, in his book, “
The Second Bill of Rights – FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need it More than Ever”, describes the philosophy that motivated Roosevelt to fight for his radical (at the time) programs to benefit the American people:
To Roosevelt, human distress could no longer be taken as an inevitable by-product of life, society, or “nature”; it was an artifact of social policies and choices. Much human misery is preventable. The only question is whether a government is determined to prevent it…. Foremost was the idea that poverty is preventable, that poverty is destructive, wasteful, demoralizing, and that poverty is morally unacceptable in a Christian and democratic society.
Consequently, FDR introduced the concept of economic and social rights, which had not gained much traction in the United States until his Presidency. FDR’s Presidency and fervent advocating of these rights coincided with circumstances (The Great Depression) that made their need glaringly apparent to a large proportion of American citizens. Roosevelt’s method for establishing a Second Bill of Rights was through more than twelve years of advocating for these rights and putting them into practice through executive orders and pushing Congress to enact legislation. Perhaps more important, by the end of FDR’s Presidency large segments of the American population accepted many aspects of his Second Bill of Rights as legitimate rights – for example, the right to a good education.
Continued success of the New Deal extending decades after its initiationThe New Deal didn’t just fade away after FDR’s death. Instead, due to its stunning success, most of its components lasted for decades. Largely as a result of this, we experienced for the next three decades what Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman calls “
the greatest sustained economic boom in U.S. history”. Beginning in 1947, when accurate statistics first became available,
median family income rose steadily (in 2005 dollars) from $22,499 in 1947 to more than double that, $47,173 in 1980 (See Figure 2.1 on page 23 of report).
The “Reagan Revolution” reversal of New Deal economic policy With the advent of the
Reagan Revolution in 1981, characterized by a return to the “free market” ideology of the Gilded Age, the route marked out by FDR was reversed. Since that time, except for a brief respite during the latter years of the Clinton presidency, the income of American workers has been virtually stagnant, despite large increases in American productivity which enriched the already wealthy.
The reign of “free-market” ideology has been characterized by an ideological ban against government intervention in economic matters to help those who most need it, which played out domestically and internationally. William Greider, in his book, “
Come Home, America – The Rise and Fall (And Redeeming Promise) of our Country”, explains how this played out on the international stage:
The World Trade Organization enforces rules that protect capital investors and corporations, but it has no rules protecting workers and communities, that is, people. The so-called Washington Consensus – a stern dogma imposed on developing countries that borrow from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund preaches that national governments must not try to protect their people from the harsh side effects of capital and commerce. America’s representative democracy, meanwhile, is offered as the model the world should follow, despite the democratic breakdown that Americans well know is in progress….
Greider mentions globalization as another of the factors contributing to the demise of the United States. However, he also notes that other nations are affected by globalization just as much as the United States is, and yet other industrialized nations have much less economic inequality than the United States because they are not bounded by the inflexible right wing ideology of the so-called “free market”. James Galbraith, in his book, “
The Predator State”, explains why globalization and free trade agreements need
not cause serious adverse effects for American workers, if only we would give up that radical “free market” ideology that the right wingers have foisted upon us:
The populist objective is to raise American wages, create American jobs, and increase the fairness and security of our economic system… Is there a better way to do this…? Of course there is – and that is to do it directly. You want higher wages? Raise them. You want more and better jobs? Create them.
In other words, our government should work directly for the average American, not the corporatocracy using the rationale that expansion of corporate wealth will “trickle down” to everyone else.
CLASS WARFARE AGAINST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TODAYOur situation has not improved. It could easily be argued that we reached the pinnacle of class warfare against the American people with the presidency of George W. Bush – with his massive tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation in the interest of his corporate donors, and his imperialist wars.
Continuation of class warfare against the American people during the Obama PresidencyNor have things improved under President Obama. Perhaps one of the biggest reasons why things haven’t improved under Obama is that, until very recently he failed to recognize or acknowledge (only he knows which one) the nature or existence of the class warfare perpetrated against the American people by the American Oligarchy. Instead, he has mostly bought into the right wing point of view and worsened the situation by conceding to erroneous right wing talking points about such things as the origin of our expanding national debt. William Greider recently commented on this in his article, “
Obama’s Bad Bargain”:
The claim that cutting Social Security benefits will “strengthen” the system is erroneous. In fact, Obama has already undermined the soundness of Social Security by partially suspending the FICA payroll tax for workers – depriving the system of revenue it needs for long-term solvency.
The mendacity has a more fundamental dimension. Obama helped conservatives concoct the debt crisis on false premises, promoting a claim that Social Security and other entitlement programs were somehow to blame while gliding over the real causes and culprits… There should be no mystery about what caused the $14 trillion debt: large deficits began in 1981, with Ronald Reagan’s fanciful “supply side” tax-cutting. Federal debt was then around $1 trillion. By 2007 it had reached $9 trillion, thanks to George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy and his two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the massive subsidy for Big Pharma in Medicare drug benefits.
Ari Berman expands on how Obama’s rhetoric and actions
shifted the debate way to the right and fueled the belief that we need drastic cuts in long-standing safety net programs:
President Obama has actively shifted the debt debate to the right, both substantively and rhetorically. Substantively by not insisting on a “clean bill” to raise the debt ceiling at the outset and actively pushing for drastic spending cuts and changes to entitlement programs as part of any deal. And rhetorically by mimicking right-wing arguments about the economy, such as the canard that reducing spending will create jobs (it won’t), or that the government’s budget is like a family’s budget (it isn’t), or that major spending cuts will return confidence to the market and spur the economy recovery we’ve all been waiting for (
Paul Krugman calls it “the confidence fairy”).
Due to the combined effects of right wing fanatics who repeat their phony arguments ad nauseum, a corporate owned media that echoes those arguments, and a Democratic President and some Congressional Democrats who also echo those arguments, the American public is becoming more and more inured to the idea that deep cuts to so-called “entitlement” programs will help our economy. Berman continues:
By a two to one margin, according to a July
Quinnipiac poll, Americans still believe that reducing unemployment is more important than cutting the deficit. But they only narrowly believe that reducing unemployment is more important than reducing federal government spending, by a 49 to 43 margin. And the public now says that “major cuts in federal spending” would help, not hurt, the economy, a 15 point
reversal from March.
Robert Borosage and Katrina Vanden Heuval recently summarized the situation we face today, in: “
The American Dream: Can a Movement Save it?”
Obama put forth reforms in areas the country must address: healthcare, energy and finance. The president’s proposals were cautious, often pre-emptively compromised, but he had his head handed to him anyway. The economic recovery act was weakened, energy reform blocked, financial re-regulation neutered, healthcare deformed. Conservative obstruction and powerful corporate interests stymied change.
The failure fed voter skepticism about government. Washington bailed out Wall Street but did little for Main Street. It ran up deficits but failed to generate jobs. The White House embraced establishment calls for a premature turn to deficit reduction, distracting
from the need for more federal action to stimulate economic recovery. Pollster Stanley Greenberg says voters “think that the game is rigged.” As he summarizes, they “see a nexus of money and power, greased by special interest lobbyists and large campaign donations.… They do not believe the fundamentals have really changed in Mr. Obama’s Washington.”
Those people are right on target.
I’ll end this post with two great quotes that put the lie to the accusation by the American oligarchy, of class warfare perpetrated against
them, by
us. First, Elizabeth Warren commenting on that accusation:
I hear all this, you know, 'Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever'. No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own – nobody.
You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory – and hire someone to protect against this – because of the work the rest of us did.
Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless – keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
You can
watch the video here. And you can
send Elizabeth Warren a "thank you" note by clicking here.
And here is Bill Moyers’ accurate
description of the American oligarchy:
This crowd in charge has a vision sharply at odds with the American People. They would arrange Washington and the world for the convenience of themselves and the transnational corporations that pay for their elections… The people who control the U.S. government today want “a society run by the powerful, oblivious to the weak, free of any oversight, enjoying a cozy relationship with government, and thriving on crony capitalism.
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