Class Warfare

Lev Davidovich Wuerffel    Politics     Bill Clinton, Cannibalism, Cheney, Republican Douchebaggery, Unions, W

One trend I’ve loved in the last eight years has been watching Repubs scream “class warfare!” any time regular folk (or the very rare politician) criticizes the absurd tax breaks and other financial advantages given to the wealthy in this country. The irony is so palpable it’s like a 16-ton-weight falling on the speaker from the sky as in one of the old Monty Python bits. Repubs scream about welfare, despite that program’s being nearly gutted (beginning under Clinton, I might add), and always find a way to suggest that the problems of our country come from the bottom up, particularly from Black people who live in cities, while simultaneously paying fake homage to the hypocritical pieties of rural, small-town white folk. Their ability to derail any honest discussion of class-based inequities in our society has kept many middle-class (and lower) Americans from noting that the GOP hasn’t been putting forward policies that help them.

Our latest evidence is the (so-far) unattributed memo sent to Senate Repubs urging them to vote down the auto bailout package. It contained three bulleted suggestions, including this one:

This is the democrats first opportunity to payoff organized labor after the election. This is a precursor to card check and other items. Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor, instead of taking their first blow from it.

If there was any doubt among any sentient beings that the decision the Repubs made has no relation to what’s best for the country, this memo eliminates it. Their vote was purely based on an effort to take a shot at unions and hurt a key Democratic constituency. Union-bashing works for the GOP in many places, of course, where non-union people have allowed attention to the (sadly, real) corruption in some of the very biggest unions (UAW, SEIU) to lead them to ignore the VERY NECESSARY protections and comforts offered to workers by unions. The auto companies helped the Repubs by not fighting the nonsense “Auto union workers make $73/hour! They need a pay cut!” arguments they levied against line workers, not explaining that that number included their retirement, health benefits, and group pool payments into one big number and then divided it by the number of workers. Given that kind of calculation, the assistant manager at your local Burger King makes $35/hour. It’s bullshit, and they know it.

The Bushies’ efforts to gut worker safety and other OSHA provisions, coupled with the Repubs’ desperate fight against card check and any other methods of organizing that give workers a better chance of coming together to protect their rights and pay, show that class warfare is always alive and well in this country, but it’s almost always the upper class making war on everyone else. Try it in the reverse direction and you’re a SOCIALIST (not a designation this author, obviously, would resent, but which still amazingly carries a taint in our mentally ill society).

Using tax money to rescue automakers from their ridiculously bad business models disgusts me, but the alternative (potentially up to three million lost jobs, the collapse of the economy in many of the Rust Belt states, bands of cannibal Michigan State fans howling through the woods of the Upper Peninsula) is certainly worse. How ironic that W. and Dick see the need to do this bailout, recognizing that whatever shred of a chance they have to not be seen as the men who completely ruined this great country rests on their ability to get this bailout done.

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