Corporate Interests Baiting Middle Class

Hat Tip To Jeff.

This is one of the best articles I have come across in many a day.  I strongly enourage a full read here….or at least the portion below.

It wasn’t our public workers who sunk the economy, sucking tax revenue from state budgets and dollars from pension funds and 401ks. Teachers didn’t deregulate Wall Street or push home ownership policy for those who had no chance of affording it. Social workers didn’t deregulate pharmaceutical companies so that they could use direct-to-consumer marketing to promote unnecessary or copycat prescription drugs to increase profits. Park rangers didn’t drive up health care costs, making benefit packages far more costly for government than when they were originally negotiated.

Yet we are eating this up. We are, again, allowing large corporate interests to bait us into middle class jealousies and petty arguments as they scrape more profits off the backs of the public.

Somehow, the conversation has been skewed to the point that we accept a man arguing that a slight raise in taxes for corporations and the wealthy is unconscionable – that those at the top of the ladder have our best interests in mind – and that they need to have more cash on hand to make the decisions to get us out of this mess.

The way to balance the budget, they say, is to cut back on pay, benefits, and bargaining power for middle-income earners.

Why is it that any mention of taxing the wealthiest Americans is shouted down as class warfare, but cutting wages and benefits of middle-class Americans working in public service is not?

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This argument over bargaining rights and pension contributions and wages for teachers takes our eyes and anger off the powerful places where the real money goes. The billions upon billions that go to defense contractors for weapons that do us precious little good when fighting guerrilla wars in the hills of Afghanistan or the streets of Iraq. Off the subsidies sent to Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, and Blackwater (now Xe), where employees are counted as private sector employees, as testaments to the power of capitalism. But those companies are propped up by Uncle Sam’s defense spending, and by Uncle Sam’s foreign policy.