Things You Might Have Missed In the Class War: August 2011

About this blog:

What if they held a class war and nobody noticed? For decades, liberals and progressives have been bashed for conducting a "class war" every time they suggest that it would be appropriate for the extremely wealthy to shoulder a bit more of the burden of paying for government. Meanwhile, a swarm of far-right think-tanks and political action committees have been working tirelessly to promote the idea that taxes on the wealthy should be lowered further from their historic lows, and that entitlement programs such as social security and medicare are too expensive to sustain (and in any case, immoral). The latest attempts to delegitimize public employee unions are the logical next step in what genuinely appears to be the systematic dismantlement of the middle class. This blog will highlight some of the more extreme examples of this activity that may not always show up in your news feeds.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

This Is How Empires End

Great quote at the end of a post from the interesting labor-oriented New Zealand blog, The Standard:

This is what happens at the end of empires. The interests of the elite become completely divorced from the interests of the ordinary people. Factions in the elite fight intensely amongst themselves, rather than looking outwards to tackle their shared challenges. They create crises for petty political advantage, which ultimately weaken the empire and accelerate the fall.
The millionaires in Congress and the millionaires who back them feel no personal sake in the health of their economy and don’t feel the need to plan responsibly for the future. They do not think about the future of their country anymore, they think about how to win the next battle. How to hurt the other side, even if it means hurting the economy. Everything becomes just a political pawn, even defaulting on debt, even decimating the services that millions rely on when they are sick or out of work.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Just belatedly discovered Freddie deBoer's post from last January. It's lengthy, but includes a lot of good stuff about the absence of any truly left-wing viewpoint in our discourse. Being new to his blog, I looked at some of his recent posts and found this one, stating his basic political creed, to be excellent. In particular, I enjoyed this:

Can anyone claim that the Obama administration has done anything whatsoever to advance my interests? Not a day goes by where I argue politics online without some Obama supporter hurling invective at me and insisting that I have no choice, that if I refuse to vote for Obama I am in essence voting for Michelle Bachmann, that it's a two party system and I should just take it and like it, or, most absurdly, that he secretly is pursuing my agenda and I'm just too stupid to read the tea leaves and SEE.