The following are excerpts from an article at HuffPo written by Joseph A. Palermo, who is an Associate Professor of American History at California State University. I strongly recommend that you read the entire article, which details the failings of our media to educate Americans as to the cause of the sorry state of our economy, which is doing great on Wall St for the plutonomy, and terrible everywhere else.
This one excerpt sums up perfectly how I would frame the great struggle of our times.
Politicians, pundits, commentators, and citizens must choose a side now. You're either on the oligarchy's side or on the people's side. It's D-Day in the class war.
HuffingtonPost.com
More truth below the fold
Crossposted at The Progressive Electorate.com
More from Professor Palermo, who trashes bipartisanship as a tool of the class war . . .
After a decade of stagnant or declining real wages, "bipartisan" schemes are proliferating to shift the burden of Washington policymakers' own catastrophic mismanagement of the nation's fiscal policies right onto the shoulders of working people. The press commentary has been abysmal. All "serious" thinkers out there on television or in print are in full agreement that "entitlements" must take a big hit, along with education and health care.
~snip~
Few in the press seem to want to educate the public about how we got into this fiscal crisis in the first place or why projected budget surpluses at the beginning of the Bush years were so needlessly squandered. And remember, those surpluses were turned into deficits through "bipartisan" agreements, such as the Bush tax cuts, the wars, and the bailouts. There's also precious little mention of the grotesque inequality in American society these days, which is worse than even during the Gilded Age. The establishment press seems determined to avoid the obvious conclusion: The rich, the super-rich, and the super-duper rich (as well as the conglomerates) must pay more in taxes to get the United States through the crisis. Ending the two debilitating wars and rolling back what Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" should be next. And the billions of dollars wasted in corporate welfare each year must be diverted to human needs.
These steps should be the top priorities before any "deficit-reduction plan" is seriously considered -- "bipartisan" or otherwise. At this moment in American history, after large swathes of the middle class have been wiped out, the last thing we need is another elite-driven assault on the living standards of working people.
HuffingtonPost.com
Wall Street is doing just fine. Everyone else is suffering. CEO salaries continue to climb while most Americans saw a decrease in real wages over the last decade. Coincidence? Of course not.
During the Cheney/Bush Administration America experienced the largest redistribution of wealth in it's history, from the working class to the investor class. After being robbed by the banksters it was the WORKING CLASS that bailed them out, fought their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, over and over it is the working class who has bailed out the "job creators", and now they plan on repaying the millions of people who they've driven to the brink of poverty by imposing "Austerity" for the lower 98% while they themselves enjoy their "prosperity" and more tax cuts to go with it.
Yes, it is class war. And we are not just losing, this is our D-Day.
Because America can't afford to lose another decade to the banksters. To be blunt, if BOTH parties are hell bent on dismantling FDR's "New Deal" we are really, really fucked.
It turns out that Bipartisanship is a word that means BOTH parties have agreed on fucking you.
What we need is LEADERSHIP. And I don't think it is going to come form President Obama. Not on the class war, not with Honeywell CEO David M. Cote on the Catfood Commission, or with Larry Summers and Tim Geithner in charge of the disaster they both created, not with Ben Bernanke still in charge of the Federal Reserve, not with the comfortable status quo of the DLC crowd surrounding him, and not with the watered down reforms on important issues like Health Insurance Reform and Wall St reform and the total lack of urgency on other issues like pro union EFCA legislation, anti pollution cap and trade legislation, and a bevy of other pieces of need CHANGE currently dying in the Senate Majority Leaders "In" bow. I believe one of two things must be true of President Obama, either he means well and is getting really shitty advice, or he is in on the banksters heist. I still have sincere hope that it is the former, but evidence is pointing to the later.
It is D-day in the class war. The people, the consumers, the workers, versus the Oligarchy of super rich people and their powerful corporate personhoods. In the last decades the very rich, whom Bush used to call "his base", has stolen your jobs and your homes, and now they are coming for the pittance that was going to be your retirement. Coupled with the Supreme Courts Citizens United decision and you have a recipe for an unshakable Oligarchy, a vampire squid sucking the life blood out of America's working class. We need JOBS. We need good paying jobs with benefits. And we need them NOW. But more than that we need LEADERSHIP, a leadership that calls the enemy what it is, class war, and names the enemies for who they are, powerful special interests, a wall st gone wild, the military industrial complex, the Too Big To Fail rich, the corporate owned propaganda machine we call "the media", and the wholly corrupted agents of the oligarchy who call themselves our "Representatives" when we all know it was big money who put them there and big money whom they serve. That is real bipartisanship.
Those are just my thoughts. We need a general who is on the side of the people in the class war. I hope it is Obama. If not, I will take whoever wants the challenge, but make no mistake, as Professor Palermo says it best "You're either on the oligarchy's side or on the people's side. It's D-Day in the class war."
Check out the Battle In Seattle, or the Pittsburgh g20 meetings of last year, or the more recent Toronto g20 meetings. This is what class war looks like. This is what corporate fascism looks like. This is what oligarchy looks like.
Battle in Seattle 1999
Pittsburgh G20 meetings 2009
G20 Toronto
Lesson, if you protest the government and socialism you get on Fox News and all the other TV networks, but if you protest Free Trade and capitalism you get a bat in the head and tear gas in your face. THAT is class war. This is our D-Day.
How do we fight back without losing the little we have left?
Fight back
Peace, love, and hope to all
You can follow me on Twitter @JesseLaGreca