Class Warfare

[Rant] I am tired of hearing the conservatives crying that it is class warfare to tax the millionaires and billionaires and then at the same time they are cutting the safety net for unemployed and the disabled. When you take from the middle class and the poor and give it to the rich; folks that is class warfare.

The conservatives say that the rich create jobs and we have to keep their tax cuts. Well if that was true, then we must not be in a recession, Bush’s tax cut for the super-rich in 2001 should have prevented us from going into the longest and deepest recession in our history and creating the largest deficit ever.

During the Bush years, the wealthiest 400 Americans saw their wealth increase by some $400 billion and are collectively worth over $1.3 trillion. Today, the top one percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90% and earns more income than the bottom 50%. What is trickling down is not green, but brown. More people are unemployed, more people are on food stamps (SNAP), more people do not health insurance, more people are below the poverty level, and more people are working multiple jobs than ever before.

The conservatives say that the tax cuts for big business will create jobs. DuPont between 2005 – 2009 cut their US workforce by 9% while their worldwide workforce grew by 54%, at the same time they were getting tax breaks. The Republicans want to increase corporate tax breaks, while the Democrats want to reward companies that create jobs in the US (Don’t forget that the Supreme Court said last year that international corporation can influence the US elections directly supporting candidates or parties. DuPont’s CIO told AP that, “We are a global player out to succeed in any geography were we participate in.” In other words they do not owe their allegiance to the US, but to their stockholders.).

I’ll tell you what is class warfare, back before I retired, one year we were told that our salaries would be frozen. Okay, in this economy we were happy to have our jobs. A couple of months later we were told that our division met our profit goals for the year and management thanked us for our work in accomplishing the goals. A few days later, our HR director came to me and asked if I wanted to go up to corporate for a reception to celebrated making our goals (we were the only division to make our goals). I went up there with another supervisor and we stood around talking to engineers from corporate that we knew. So here we all are eating those fancy hors d'oeuvres and drinking wine. The president of the company got up on stage and thanked us for our hard work and then awarded our VP his bonus for making our profit goals, his bonus was $300,000! Well engineers being engineers pulled out their calculators and start figuring… knowing the division employment budget and what we would have gotten in raises, they calculated that our total raises for the division would have been around $200,000. So they took our raises out of our pockets and gave it to the VP for freezing our salaries. That is class warfare. And they had the nerve to rub it in our face at a reception that had to cost at least $5,000 with all the free food and booze.[/Rant]