We Are In A Class War And American Workers Are Losing

The following post is by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich: 

The last time Americans faced such overwhelming evidence that the monied interests were screwing them over was the Great Crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression, resulting in the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, starting in 1933.

 

The one silver lining of the current Trump-Musk-Bezos-Ellison-Murdoch-Koch horror show is that most Americans now know beyond any reasonable doubt that they’re on the losing side of a class war, and are justifiably pissed, 

America’s first trillionaire is a vicious white supremacist who’s stirring up hate around the world and backing Republican candidates with big bucks. American billionaires, meanwhile, are openly sucking up to America’s first dictator, spending lavishly on whatever he wants, and gobbling up media outlets so most Americans won’t know what’s going on. 

Where has this gotten us? Workers’ share of the nation’s income has now dropped to the lowest it’s been since records began in 1947, while profits’ share is the highest since 1950 (showing up in a rip-roaring stock market).

This is morally wrong. “Income from capital risks replacing income from labor,” Pope Leo wrote in Magnifica Humanitas, his recent encyclical letter. 

It’s also undermining our democracy. “America has a choice,” the jurist Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said. “We can have great wealth in a few hands or we can have a democracy, but we cannot have both.”

It’s time for Democrats to take on the class war that’s being waged by the nation’s oligarchy against most Americans by becoming class warriors themselves.

By class warrior I don’t mean resorting to violence or name-calling. I mean recognizing that a billionaire class is bad for America and calling for bold changes to reverse it: taxing great wealth, busting up monopolies, strengthening labor unions, raising the minimum wage, demanding profit-sharing and capital-sharing, ensuring Medicare for all and a universal basic income, and getting big money out of politics. 

FDR wasn’t afraid to be a class warrior: “Never before in all our history have [the monied interests] been so unified against one candidate as they stand today,” he thundered in 1936. “They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

But these days, most Democratic politicians are reluctant to take on the oligarchs. Other than Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Zohran Mamdani, who else is loudly doing it? 

Instead of being class warriors, many Democratic politicians are class worriers. They openly worry that inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity are out of control — but they won’t fight for what must be done. I’m talking about Third-way “moderate” Democrats who focus on “suburban swing” voters. and Washington-based consultants who urge Democratic candidates to move to the “center.” 

Some Democrats are simply class wimps, so afraid of offending the monied interests that fund their campaigns they won’t even support modest reforms. 

Even here in California, the putative home of progressive politics in America, too many Democratic politicians are wimping out. California Governor Gavin Newsom publicly opposes the wealth tax initiative now on California’s November ballot, for fear billionaires will leave the state (they won’t). San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie led the opposition to a city ballot measure to expand the city’s higher corporate tax rate on companies whose CEOs make at least 100 times more than their median employees. The measure was narrowly defeated. 

This has to change. Unless Democrats stand up to the oligarchs now running this nation, there won’t be any alternative to Trump Republicanism in the future, or any reason for a Democratic Party.

 

This should be the Democrats’ hour. With inequality at levels never before seen, with a racist trillionaire and scores of billionaires poisoning our politics, with corporate profits at record heights while most American workers struggle harder than ever just to stay afloat, with a Republican majority in Congress slashing Medicaid and food stamps to finance a tax cut for the super-rich, with the looming threat of AI destroying jobs, and with one of the most brazenly corrupt politicians in American history now occupying the Oval Office — with all of this, Democrats should be at least as loud as they were under FDR.

 

The Democratic Party must seek to return to the American people the wealth and power that the obscenely rich have taken from them. This should be the core Democratic message. It explains the affordability crisis. It reveals the epidemic of corruption. It clarifies corporate welfare and crony capitalism. It shows what must be done.

It's Time To Fight Back Against Billionaire "Class Warriors"

Billionaires would have you believe they are being picked on by those wanting them to be taxed more. But the truth is they are the aggressors -- wanting a free ride while workers pay the bill. Here's how former Labor Secretary Robert Reich puts it:

The richest person in America tweeted last week that Democrats have “become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.”

Hello? Democrats are the party of division and hate? What planet has Elon been living on?

Meanwhile, the second-richest person in America (Jeff Bezos) tweeted that the Democrats’ proposed tax hikes on the rich will not tame inflation and their proposed spending would worsen it (he’s wrong, and I’ll explain why in another post).

In addition to last week’s billionaire tweetstorm, it was reported that Oracle’s Larry Ellison (#7 on Forbes’ list of richest Americans) in November 2020 joined Sean Hannity, Lindsay Graham, and Trump’s attorney to discuss strategies for contesting the presidential election results.

Oh, and Ellison has dumped some $25 million into a Super PAC supporting South Carolina Republican senator Tim Scott, a Trump endorsee. 

As I noted last week, another billionaire, Peter Thiel, has donated at least as much to Trump-endorsed Republicans in senate primaries.

Not to mention Trump-diehards Charles Koch (#16 on the Forbes list), Rupert Murdoch (#31), and Carl Icahn (#43).

This is the same crew, not incidentally, that’s been fighting unions and flooding Congress and statehouses with cash to support Trump election deniers, prevent tax hikes on themselves, and kill off Biden’s and the Democrats’ agenda (more on this in a moment).  

This billionaire bombardment gives Biden and the Democrats an opportunity to tell America whose side they’re on and whose side they’re not on — in effect, to declare class war on the class warriors. 

Will they take it?

Not in over a century has so much of the nation’s wealth been concentrated at the very top — in the richest one-tenth of one percent of the richest one-tenth of one percent. Not in seventy years have corporations been as flush with cash, notwithstanding the stock market’s recent selloff. Not since the 1890s have CEOs raked in as much pay relative to average workers. Not since the creation of the income tax have the super-rich paid as low a rate as they do now relative to tax rate paid by most other Americans.

Isn’t it time for Biden and the Democrats to tell this to America? 

Wealth isn’t a zero-sum game in which more at the top necessarily means less below, but wealth is tied to power — and power is a zero-sum game.

Many of America’s wealthiest and most powerful are now gathering for their annual gabfest in Davos, Switzerland, just as the annual get-together of America’s right (CPAC) is coming to a close in Budapest, Hungary. The two conferences are beginning to converge. Although the CEOs and hedge fund managers at Davos profess to worry about America’s record inequality and tout “corporate social responsibility,” their own corporate political action committees are doing everything possible to squelch tax increases on them, and to prevent additional spending on health care, child care, and other needs of average working people. 

Meanwhile, not even the Republicans’ billionaire backers can disguise the total absenceof a Republican agenda to help average working people.

The reason Democrats haven’t been able to get their agenda through the Senate and raise taxes on billionaires or on big corporations to pay for it — or even repeal the Trump tax cuts that went mostly to the top — is because Democrats have only 48 senate votes (all fifty Senate Republicans are against these measures, and the other two senate Democrats are major beneficiaries of campaign donations from corporations and the rich).

Isn’t it time for Biden and the Democrats tell this to the American people, and offer them a clear choice in the upcoming midterms and beyond?

Billionaires are mounting a class war. Republican lawmakers are mounting a culture war to deflect attention from it.

On October 31, 1936, in New York’s Madison Square Garden, Franklin D. Roosevelt, facing a bruising re-election bid, defined the stakes much as they are today. He explained that America was in a struggle against “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering” and that a wealthy elite “had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs.”

He continued: “We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”

Then FDR said, in words similar to what Joe Biden and Democrats should be using against the billionaires and bigots who are now arrayed against them:

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.

Isn’t it time Biden and the Democrats came out clearly against the billionaires abusing their wealth and power by suppressing the wages of average working people and flooding our democracy with their money? And against the culture warriors who are covering up for them? Isn’t it time for Biden and the Democrats to explain why they haven’t been able to get their agenda through Congress? 

Biden and the Democrats should tell Americans which side they are on — and ask America to choose sides.

Economic Class Matters During An Epidemic

The charts above reflect the results of a new Axios / Ipsos Poll. They surveyed 1,355 adults nationwide between March 27th and 30th, and the survey had a 2.8 point margin of error.

It's easy for the media and government officials to tell people they should be working from home. But there are a lot of people, especially in the lower - lower middle - middle classes that don't have that option. They work at jobs that require their presence. Far more upper middle and upper class individuals have that option.

The bottom half are also more likely to be laid-off or furloughed because their workplace is closed.

Social and economic class matters in an emergency like this epidemic. Those who earn the least are hurt the worst -- and sadly, get less government help. That needs to change.

Trump Is Lying About The Tax Cuts The GOP Wants

If there's anything we should have learned by now, it's that Donald Trump is a shameless LIAR. He has literally lied over a thousand times since assuming office, and he is lying once again -- this time about the "middle class" tax cuts he says Congress is going to pass.

He said he wouldn't personally benefit from those tax cuts. That's a lie. He will save millions in taxes in several ways. He said the wealthiest Americans wouldn't benefit from the tax cuts. That's a lie. Nearly all of the tax cuts will go to the rich and the corporations. He said the middle class would be the biggest recipients of the tax cuts. That's a lie. The middle class will get only a pittance, and some will even have to pay more in taxes.

And it gets worse. To pay for their tax cut for the rich, Trump and the Republicans want to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs that actually help ordinary Americans.

The Republican tax cut is nothing more than a huge transfer of wealth from the poor, working class, and middle class, to the rich and the corporations. It is class war, and it is aimed at the Americans who can least afford it. It must be stopped.

GOP "Health" Plan Is Just Class Warfare (For The Rich)

(Cartoon image is by David Horsey in the Los Angeles Times.)

This coming week, the Senate Republicans will try again to agree on a health plan to replace Obamacare. We can only hope that they fail again -- because it's not a health care plan at all. It's a massive tax cut for the rich -- accomplished taking health insurance away from millions of other Americans. It is nothing less than more class warfare by the Republicans on behalf of the rich.

Here's how Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman (pictured) describes it in his New York Times column:

The Senate version of Trumpcare – the Better Care Reconciliation Act – is out. The substance is terrible: tens of millions of people will experience financial distress if this passes, and tens if not hundreds of thousands will die premature deaths, all for the sake of tax cuts for a handful of wealthy people. What’s even more amazing is that Republicans are making almost no effort to justify this massive upward redistribution of income. They’re doing it because they can, because they believe that the tribalism of their voters is strong enough that they will continue to support politicians who are ruining their lives.

In this sense – and in only this sense – what we’re seeing now is a departure from previous Republican practice.

In the past, laws that would take from the poor and working class while giving to the rich came with excuses. Tax cuts, their sponsors declared, would unleash market dynamism and make everyone more prosperous. Deregulation would increase efficiency and lower prices. It was all voodoo; the promises never came true. But at least there was some pretense of working for the common good.

Now we have none of this. This bill does nothing to reduce health care costs. It does nothing to improve the functioning of health insurance markets – in fact, it will send them into death spirals by reducing subsidies and eliminating the individual mandate. There is nothing at all in the bill that will make health care more affordable for those currently having trouble paying for it. And it will gradually squeeze Medicaid, eventually destroying any possibility of insurance for millions.

Who benefits? It’s all about the tax cuts, almost half of which will go to people with incomes over $1 million, the great bulk to people with incomes over 200K. 

So, is this bill good for you? Yes, if you meet the following criteria:

1.Your income is more than $200,000 a year
2.You have a job that comes with good health insurance
3.You can’t imagine any circumstances under which you lose that job or income
4.You don’t have any family members or friends who don’t meet those criteria
5.You have zero empathy for anyone else

The set of people who can check all these boxes is not a winning political coalition. But Republican leaders believe that their voters are tribal enough, sufficiently walled off from information, that they’ll ignore the attack on their lives and keep voting R – indeed, that as they lose health care, get hit with crushing out-of-pocket bills, see their friends and neighbors face ruin, they’ll blame it on Democrats.

I wish I were sure that this belief was false.

GOP's Health Plan Is Class Warfare (By The Rich)

(Cartoon image is by Adam Zyglis in The Buffalo News.)

The following is part of an excellent article by Dylan Matthews at Vox.com:

The Republican plan would reduce federal revenues by $883 billion over 10 years. About $210 billion of that comes from eliminating the employer and individual mandates; the former is paid by companies that don’t insure their employees, and the latter is progressive, as it’s levied as a percentage of income.

But the bulk of the tax cuts would come from eliminating specific provisions meant to raise money for the Medicaid expansion and insurance subsidies in Obamacare, rather than to make sure the insurance market functions properly. The biggest of those is the 3.8 percent tax the Affordable Care Act applied to capital gains, dividend, and interest income for families with $250,000 or more in income ($125,000 for singles). The CBO finds that getting rid of this tax costs $157.6 billion over 10 years.

Repealing that tax is a change that, by definition, only helps the rich, or at least the affluent. If you’re part of a married couple and, like the vast majority of Americans, make less than $250,000 a year, or earn more than that but have little investment income, it doesn’t affect you at all. The Tax Policy Center finds that repealing the tax would amount to an average tax cut of $0 for households in the bottom 90 percent — those making $208,500 or below. A handful of people in the 80th to 95th percentiles would see cuts, but the vast majority wouldn’t. 

By contrast, members of the top 0.1 percent, who each on average make more than $3.75 million annually, would get an average tax cut of $165,090. 

Then there’s the 0.9 percent Medicare surtax, a hike on wage income in excess of $250,000 a year ($200,000 for unmarried people). The Republican bill would repeal this surtax, which the CBO estimates will cost $117.3 billion over 10 years. That would give everyone in the bottom 90 percent an average tax cut of $0, per the Tax Policy Center. The richest of the rich, the top 0.1 percent, would get an average cut of $30,520.

Another way of saying this is that the Affordable Care Act was one of the single largest downward redistributions of income in American history, made more so when considered in the context of the Obama administration’s increases in taxes on the rich and expansions of tax credits for the poor. This was a point that Jason Furman, Obama’s chief economist, made well in a speech last October.

“In concert with the effects of the ACA coverage provisions, changes in tax policy since 2009 will by 2017 boost incomes for families in the bottom quintile by 18 percent, or $2,200 (the equivalent to about a decade of income gains), and in the second quintile by about 6 percent, or $1,500, relative to what they would have been under the continuation of 2008 policies,” Furman noted. “Under President Obama, the Federal investment in inequality has increased by about 0.8 percent of potential GDP, more than any previous president since the Great Society.”

You don’t have to take Furman’s word for it. A simple glance at the funding mechanisms of the ACA — things like the surtaxes on income above $250,000 — and what it spent money on (namely health insurance for the poor) makes it clear that it takes money from the rich and gives it to the poor, in the form of health insurance.

The American Health Care Act, the Republican health care legislation backed by President Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan, undoes basically all of those components. And then it goes a step further, by slashing Medicaid to below its pre–Affordable Care Act levels using a per capita cap.

The AHCA would reverse one of the greatest actions against inequality ever taken by the federal government, and then increase inequality yet further. It is an act of class warfare against low-income Americans, waged for the benefit of the handful of rich taxpayers affected by Obamacare’s surtaxes.

Krugman On GOP Economics

Krugman is right. The Republicans don't really care about the deficit (or the debt). If they did, they wouldn't have run both up so high during the Bush administration. They simply use the deficit (and the debt) as excuses to destroy programs they never liked, so they can give more away to their rich buddies.

A Class War Exists - And Is Justified

(The image to the left is from Down With Tyranny.)

My fellow Texas blogger, timjoad, over at Free Market Socialist doesn't blog real often, but when he does it is well worth reading. His latest post is on his realization that class warfare is real -- and justified. I thought it was an excellent post, and I repost it here in an effort to give it a little wider readership. Here is what he says:

For years, I wanted to believe class warfare was not a reality in America. That every American child was born with the same opportunity, and that one could get ahead simply with a determined work effort.

I'd like to thank the Republicans for setting me straight on that.

See, I've seen a lot of Americans struggle through to put food on the table. Long hours, poor working conditions, and bosses who essentially threaten them with their jobs if they make too much noise about it. I've seen labor laws openly flouted on a routine basis, with bosses backing down only for the employees with the knowledge to stand up. I've seen those same employees fired for suspicious reasons when they communicated to their coworkers the rights that they did have.

And the whole tradeoff to working those jobs was the imaginary ladder that would somehow get you to the top, to a place where you could stop working second and third jobs and envision a comfortable retirement.

But as the economy has gone cold, I've seen many families with dual two income earners in the household. Their lives revolve around work, and leisure is an unimaginable luxury. They've dug a debt hole so deep to fill society's expectations of what they should have that they will never dig out. Fully 25% of Americans will never realize a positive net worth, and it's reasonable to expect that number to grow.

But where the rubber hit the road on this one was the last election, when GOP contempt for these individuals became clear. They weren't talking about families living on welfare benefits, they're talking about the working poor, who they continue to portray as "parasites" and "victims". These people who spend their lives on a treadmill are being told that THEY are the problem with America, and that if we would only tax them more and the wealthy less, everyone's lives would be better. This while Republicans continue to fight tooth and nail against increases in minimum wage (an intellectual dishonesty on their part, as the longer they continue to pay the same wage, the lower that wage becomes in real dollars; that's Economics 101).

Somewhere along the way, I realized I couldn't be a part of that. I was being ordered to betray the people I know who've worked so hard just to get by, in defense of a Republican ideal that deems the wealthy to be good and the poor to be bad, and reinforces it through societal fairy tales.

Make no mistake about it: what's going on right now IS class warfare. And the stakes are exceedingly high. But don't confuse yourself with who fired the first shot.

Bernie On Class War

As usual, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is absolutely correct. A class war exists, but it was not declared against the rich. It is the rich who went to war with the rest of America -- and the results have been devastating. It is time for the bottom 90% to fight back.

A Moral Political War

Call it a "class war" if you want, but I call it what it really is -- a fight for economic justice. America wasn't established to make the rich richer. It was fought and died for to fulfill the promise of giving all men/women freedom, equal rights, and the opportunity to better themselves. An important part of that is equal opportunity (economic justice). It's called the American Dream.

Corporate Socialism

They Republicans like to brag that they are against socialism, but that is not really true. They just don't want real people (the poor and disadvantaged, the elderly, the unemployed, the children, etc.) to benefit from that socialism. For them, socialist protections are intended to be used for corporations -- to protect them from expenses or losses. Unfortunately, the corporations don't repay that government largesse by sharing profits through higher wages and fair taxes. It's a one-way street -- from taxpayer wallets to corporate bank accounts, and if anyone criticizes it they are accused of waging class warfare.

Creators Of Debt

That sounds like a great idea -- going after the people who are most responsible for our debt. And that would be the corporations (and Wall Street banks) who have paid little or no tax for years now, and who receive unneeded subsidies from the government amounting to billions of dollars. And of course, the rich people who use a myriad of loopholes to pay a smaller percentage in taxes than middle class workers have to pay. Congressional Republicans call this a class war. I call it self-defense and economic justice.

There Is A Class War - And We Are Losing

Was this nation created so all its citizens could live as free men and women, and have a better life -- or was it created so a few rich people and corporations could get even richer at the expense of everyone else? We'd better make up our minds pretty fast, because the rich are stealing more of this country away from everyone else with each passing day. It won't be much longer before there's nothing left of our democracy. It is fast becoming a plutocracy, where the rich make all the rules and hog all the wealth -- and everyone else must fight for the crumbs left over.

The Rich Are Still Waging A Class War

(This caricature of prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is by DonkeyHotey.)

The rich tried to win the election by spending hundreds of millions of dollars to put one of their own in the White House. They lost because the people knew a Romney presidency would favor the rich above everyone else. Now those same rich people are trying to get from Congress what they could not get at the ballot box. It is a stealth version of class war hidden behind innocuous terms like fiscal responsibility. That is the conclusion of Paul Krugman in an article he wrote in the New York Times -- and I agree with him. Here is part of that excellent article:

On Election Day, The Boston Globe reported, Logan International Airport in Boston was running short of parking spaces. Not for cars — for private jets. Big donors were flooding into the city to attend Mitt Romney’s victory party.

They were, it turned out, misinformed about political reality. But the disappointed plutocrats weren’t wrong about who was on their side. This was very much an election pitting the interests of the very rich against those of the middle class and the poor.

And the Obama campaign won largely by disregarding the warnings of squeamish “centrists” and embracing that reality, stressing the class-war aspect of the confrontation. This ensured not only that President Obama won by huge margins among lower-income voters, but that those voters turned out in large numbers, sealing his victory.

The important thing to understand now is that while the election is over, the class war isn’t. The same people who bet big on Mr. Romney, and lost, are now trying to win by stealth — in the name of fiscal responsibility — the ground they failed to gain in an open election. . .

Consider, as a prime example, the push to raise the retirement age, the age of eligibility for Medicare, or both. This is only reasonable, we’re told — after all, life expectancy has risen, so shouldn’t we all retire later? In reality, however, it would be a hugely regressive policy change, imposing severe burdens on lower- and middle-income Americans while barely affecting the wealthy. Why? First of all, the increase in life expectancy is concentrated among the affluent; why should janitors have to retire later because lawyers are living longer? Second, both Social Security and Medicare are much more important, relative to income, to less-affluent Americans, so delaying their availability would be a far more severe hit to ordinary families than to the top 1 percent.

Or take a subtler example, the insistence that any revenue increases should come from limiting deductions rather than from higher tax rates. The key thing to realize here is that the math just doesn’t work; there is, in fact, no way limits on deductions can raise as much revenue from the wealthy as you can get simply by letting the relevant parts of the Bush-era tax cuts expire. So any proposal to avoid a rate increase is, whatever its proponents may say, a proposal that we let the 1 percent off the hook and shift the burden, one way or another, to the middle class or the poor. . .

So keep your eyes open as the fiscal game of chicken continues. It’s an uncomfortable but real truth that we are not all in this together; America’s top-down class warriors lost big in the election, but now they’re trying to use the pretense of concern about the deficit to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Let’s not let them pull it off.

The Suicide Of The Upper Class

If you blog on a regular basis, then you know that no one can produce a really great post every day. You just try to stay interesting so people will keep coming back, and hope that every now and then you knock one out of the park. And that's what I think my fellow blogger, The Omnipotent Poobah, did a few days ago. He wrote a great post and I hope he doesn't mind my reposting it, because I think as many people as possible should read it. Here is what the great Poobah had to say:

To hear the 1 percenters and those 99 percenters bent on voting against their own economic self-interests tell it, you could slap a bushy beard and crazy wig on Barack Obama and he’d be the new Karl Marx. That Karl Marx could take a Viennese sachertorte-sized chomp out of their ass and they wouldn’t know him is beside the point.

Even Karl or Barack tarted up like Karl know most people in a society must work to live and the oligarchy needs workers to keep their class alive. Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and rich people don’t create jobs – only other people with jobs create jobs.

Many Americans don’t have jobs because the upper class is so greedily incompetent they are ruining things for everyone, including themselves. They want to remove regulation falsely thinking they can trust each other to do the right thing. But capitalism is an economic system based on greed and hoping greedy people will also be honorable people is counter-intuitive, stupid, and criminally naive.

The upper classes also believe they are magic job creators – cheapster pixie Gods who can live tax free, transfer all their money to the Caymans, and send all the American jobs overseas yet still create jobs. That is why the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center says Mitt’s economic plan is “mathematically impossible“. It relies on hopelessly optimistic tax and employment rates coupled with insane budget deficit reductions.

Folks without tax accountants to find ways to avoid taxes and balance clients’ checkbooks, can tell you that if little money comes in and all the money left goes to essentials like food and a roof, the checkbook won’t balance…ever…not even if you cut everything except the food and roof.

If you aren’t working, all the money disappears fast and if you can’t find a job, it isn’t coming back. This is not called bankruptcy. This is called up Homeless Creek without a paddle and heading over the lip of Niagara Falls.

When this happens to enough people, not even rich folks can make money. Sure they can steal some, but that only lasts for a while. Stealing money from people with no money is, again, counter-intuitive and stupid. Yes, they can steal from each other, but not only does that blow the whole greedy but honorable thing out of the water, but you can’t do it for long and you need regular people to carry out your schemes.

But uh oh, you fired them. Left to carry out the details for themselves, 1 percenters like Mittens couldn’t find the pen to sign the robbery agreements.

We are in the beginning stages of serious income inequality that is galloping like an expensive Olympic show horse. Unwilling to take pay cuts, the rich become more desperate and increase the disparity out of a sense of entitlement and because the most valuable skill a thief or grifter has is how to steal or grift. It is what they do. It is their career. And like most crackheads, they are addicted to money and will shamelessly do anything to get it – even eat their own.

Lots of people claim objecting to income inequality is class warfare – that’s why Mitt only wants to talk about it in ‘quiet rooms‘. And it is class warfare – a holy class war.

Most people don’t hate success or begrudge those with lots of money. After all, most of us believe it is a virtue that anyone can accomplish with some grit and determination. What people do object to is stealing the grit, obviating the determination, and stealing the food out of your kid’s mouth while you pay for the privilege.

But even if  99 percent of us walked around with a chip on our shoulder simply hating the rich for being rich, like we hate liver for being liver, the end result is the same – a collapse of our economic system.

Since this is a holy war all of us better be in it to win – Lord and serf alike. If the serfs all starve, income equality will flow away from the Lords right into the castle outhouse pit where it will be useless to anyone. The Lords will become the new lower class. They will stay there until a handful of neo-serfs become greedy enough to use their newly restored grit and determination to rise above and start the process all over again.

But like serfs, Lords don’t live forever. The cycle is long and devastating and the mansions, and yachts, and multiple summer homes – even the Lords themselves – will be dust before it comes full circle again.

So I have some advice for the 1 percent. Come join the class war before you get what you ask for.

There is nothing so sad as a person who loses to himself and takes the rest of the team with him.