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The Continuing Republican Effort to Fracture and Thereby Politically Disable America's Great Middle

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Joanne98 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Feb-23-11 09:24 AM
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The Continuing Republican Effort to Fracture and Thereby Politically Disable America's Great Middle
As Robert Reich points out in a recent article, the new Republican strategy is to fracture, split, and pit against each other, the vast middle and working class, in four separate ways:

■pitting unionized workers against non-unionized,
■public-sector workers against non-public-sector workers,
■older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don't believe these programs will be there for them, and who don't currently need them,
■the poor against the working middle class.


By spending billions to fracture working America along these four faultlines, the Republican financial elite want ordinary Americans to come to believe that we can no longer afford to do what we very much need to do as a nation. Simultaneously they hope to deflect our attention away from their increasing share of total income and wealth, which is essentially being funneled into the pockets of this richest 1%, while jobs and wages for everyone else are allowed to languish (by being sent to China and/or be replaced by the growing efficiency of automation and computerization).

In addition, Republicans don't want us to notice their campaign to grant additional tax cuts for the rich, by way of:

■making the Bush tax cuts permanent,
■further reducing the estate tax, and
■allowing the wealthy to shift ever more of their income into capital gains, taxed at a measly 15%.


Their efforts to accomplish all this will take place on three different fronts:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Continuing-Republican-by-Richard-Clark-110222-796.html
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