Let’s Get This Class War Started
by Chris Hedges
truthdig
October 20, 2013

Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Karl Marx all began from the premise there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the masses. “Those who have too much of the goods of fortune, strength, wealth, friends, and the like, are neither willing nor able to submit to authority,” Aristotle wrote in “Politics.” “The evil begins at home; for when they are boys, by reason of the luxury in which they are brought up, they never learn, even at school, the habit of obedience.” Oligarchs, these philosophers knew, are schooled in the mechanisms of manipulation, subtle and overt repression and exploitation to protect their wealth and power at our expense. Foremost among their mechanisms of control is the control of ideas. Ruling elites ensure that the established intellectual class is subservient to an ideology—in this case free market capitalism and globalization—that justifies their greed. “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,” Marx wrote, “the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”

The blanket dissemination of the ideology of free market capitalism through the media and the purging, especially in academia, of critical voices have permitted our oligarchs to orchestrate the largest income inequality gap in the industrialized world...

It is time to grab our pitchforks.

For class warfare, there’s the 1%, and then there’s the 0.1%
by Henry Banta
Nieman Watchdog
April 17, 2012

The problem of income inequality has at last become a subject for political discussion. Commendable as this is there is something misleading about the current discussion that the press needs to help correct.

There is a point where sheer magnitude can change the fundamental nature of a thing – when something becomes so big, so large, so immense, that it morphs into something very different from all else that otherwise would be in the same category. The staggering growth in the wealth and income of the top 0.1% is just such a thing. It is not just bigger than the gap between the 1% and all the rest, it is so big that it presents a vastly different set of problems.

I’m not suggesting that the difference between the top 1% and the other 99% is not a problem or even that the differences between the top 5% or even top 10% and all the rest of us is not a problem. They are very serious problems. But the difference between the extremely rich – the top 0.1% – and all the rest of us has turned into something with the potential for destroying the fabric of our society and reducing our democracy to a hollow shell.

This is not a new idea. Some time ago David Cay Johnston (who won a Pulitzer for his tax reporting) suggested that the really important gap was not between the top 1% and all the rest of us, but rather between the top 0.1% and everyone else. Indeed, looking at the gap between the top 1% and all the rest is misleading because it hides how insanely large a share is taken up by this tiny 0.1% – even when compared with the share of the bottom half of the top 1%...
 

The Rich Are Different from You and Me – They Pay Lower Taxes
by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
April 12, 2012

Benjamin Franklin, who used his many talents to become a wealthy man, famously said that the only things certain in life are death and taxes. But if you’re a corporate CEO in America today, even they can be put on the back burner — death held at bay by the best medical care money can buy and the latest in surgical and life extension techniques, taxes conveniently shunted aside courtesy of loopholes, overseas investment and governments that conveniently look the other way.

In a story headlined, “For Big Companies, Life Is Good,” The Wall Street Journal reports that big American companies have emerged from the deepest recession since World War II more profitable than ever: flush with cash, less burdened by debt, and with a greater share of the country’s income. But, the paper notes, “Many of the 1.1 million jobs the big companies added since 2007 were outside the U.S. So, too, was much of the $1.2 trillion added to corporate treasuries.”

To add to this embarrassment of riches, the consumer group Citizens for Tax Justice reports that more than two dozen major corporations — including GE, Boeing, Mattel and Verizon — paid no federal taxes between 2008 and 2011. They got a corporate tax break that was broadly supported by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Corporate taxes today are at a 40-year-low — even as the executive suites at big corporations have become throne rooms where the crown jewels wind up in the personal vault of the CEO...

To add insult to injury, average taxpayers even help subsidize the private jet travel of the rich. On the Times’ DealBook blog, mergers and acquisitions expert Steven Davidoff writes, “If an outside security consultant determines that executives need a private jet and other services for their safety, the Internal Revenue Service cuts corporate chieftains a break. In such cases, the chief executive will pay a reduced tax bill or sometimes no tax at all.”

Are the CEOs really in danger? No, says Davidoff, “It’s a common corporate tax trick.”

Talk about your friendly skies. No wonder the people with money and influence don’t feel connected to the rest of the population. It’s as if they live in a foreign country at the top of the world, like their own private Switzerland, at heights so rarefied they can’t imagine life down below.