Paul Krugman: Class Wars of 2012 | Common Dreams

[geefloyd46]

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.

Before I get there, a word about the actual vote. Obviously, narrow economic self-interest doesn’t explain everything about how individuals, or even broad demographic groups, cast their ballots. Asian-Americans are a relatively affluent group, yet they went for President Obama by 3 to 1. Whites in Mississippi, on the other hand, aren’t especially well off, yet Mr. Obama received only 10 percent of their votes.

These anomalies, however, weren’t enough to change the overall pattern. Meanwhile, Democrats seem to have neutralized the traditional G.O.P. advantage on social issues, so that the election really was a referendum on economic policy. And what voters said, clearly, was no to tax cuts for the rich, no to benefit cuts for the middle class and the poor. So what’s a top-down class warrior to do?

The answer, as I have already suggested, is to rely on stealth — to smuggle in plutocrat-friendly policies under the pretense that they’re just sensible responses to the budget deficit.

More here: http://laborspains.blogspot.com/2012/11/class-wars-of-2012-common-dreams.html

Originally published here: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/30-4

[fasttense]

1. By hook or by crook the corporate elite will push their austerity plans

Already, greedy, hateful CEOs who have been bailed out by We The People, have come out of their hidey holes and confronted cameras all in the name of shared sacrifice and common sense entitlement reform.

But if you look carefully, you see their real plan is to create only 2 classes in the US - the filthy rich and the rest of us.

By destroying every program workers rely on to see them through economic downturns (programs workers have already paid for), the filthy rich will have every man, woman and child, who is not filthy with money like them, at their beck and call by waving a few cheap dollars at them. That's the plan man. Total absolute control of the unwashed masses by the lucky few who have plundered our national wealth.

And because our society worships the almighty dollar and NOT God, despite the screams of the ignorant Christian Right, these overpriced clerks who call themselves CEOs just might pull it off.

[midnight]

2. The stealth approach seems to get us to lower our expectations... Because the country is in such

dire straights... How could any reasonable person believe they deserve both food and healthcare.... We have been asked to give up so much, at a time when those asking us to do so are living with more wealth than they ever have....