Uprising in the Streets? Thom Hartmann Reports on Brzezinski Warning

Submitted by Vern Radul on July 7, 2011 - 4:26pm

Among other things, Hartmann reports today on a warning from Brzezinski...

The President is trying to pitch a $4 trillion deficit reduction package over the next 10 years – that slashes away at programs mostly affecting the working class and even cuts up the social safety net in America – trimming $400 billion from Medicare and Medicaid. All of these tough cuts will be in exchange for closing a few tax loopholes for corporations, millionaires, and billionaire. Ultimately, President Obama’s deal is heavy on spending cuts, light on tax hikes. But don’t expect Republicans to like the deal – they’d rather crash the Americans economy than see tax rates for their millionaire and billionaire campaign donors go up a measly 3% - to where they were under Bill Clinton when we had a budget surplus and created 23 million jobs. Right now – government revenue in America is at a 60-year-low – and Republicans are refusing to acknowledge that our government is going broke because of 3 decades of Reagan’s “starve the beast” economics and an army of corporate lobbyists that have blown holes in the tax code. We don’t have a spending problem in America – we have a revenue problem – and a debt-limit deal needs to focus on this reality. Roll back the Reagan tax cuts – and make billionaire hedge fund managers on Wall Street - who pay less in taxes than their janitor – cough up their fair share like the rest of us. That’s what shared sacrifice looks like.

Is wealth inequality in America hurdling our nation toward civil unrest? In a television interview this morning – former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski warned that the growing wealth imbalance in America – now reaching levels not seen since the Great Depression – could lead to civil unrest in the streets. As the middle-class in America falls deeper and deeper into desperation – Brzezisnki said, “we’re going to slide into intensified social conflicts, social hostility, some forms of radicalism, there is just going to be a sense that this is not a just society.” We have a society in which 400 Americans own more wealth that 150 million other Americans. We have a society in which 50% of all the children in America will depend on food stamps at some point in their life before they are 18 – and among African American children that number is 90%. We no longer live in a just society - and if Brzezinski is right - turbulent times could be ahead for America.

Full transcript of this at Truthout.org

Comments

Submitted by ed2291 on July 8, 2011 - 9:35am.

We are worse off than Obama says.

Vern is absolutely right to point out these danger signals for our republic. There are others.

Consider unemployment. The current figures for unemployment do not measure the people who have given up on looking because the jobs are simply not there. Nor does it count the "under-employed" which consist of people who are working part time and want full time. Nor does it measure those at a job which does not take advantage of their training or capabilities. And yet even so the unemployment rate remains higher than it was in the depths of all but one of the postwar recessions. (1) Consider just this one statistic. In 2010 the United States economy added 937,000 jobs. In the same year Foxconn, a company in Taiwan that builds computer gadgets, hired 300,000 workers. So just one company in Taiwan (an island about as big as New Jersey) hired one third as many people as our entire country in 2010. (2)

Consider also a report by the pentagon - hardly a bastion of left wing socialists - which raised concern over our crumbling infrastructure and declining schools. They know that a country's strength is measured by more than its military.

We need to stop believing neocon or neolib assurances that everything is all right and take a hard look at where we are as a nation.

1) Fareed Zakaria, “The Post-American World Release 2.0,” (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2011), 227.
2) Fareed Zakaria, “The Post-American World Release 2.0,” (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2011), 229.

Submitted by Cherokee Girl on July 8, 2011 - 12:48pm.

Connecting the dots

I noticed Rachel Maddow took down the ad that shows her and her staff on the floor with post it notes and charts and pencils in their mouths looking really serious following story leads. Connecting the dots? Please. There is no difference in what Obama is doing on a federal level to what Walker or those other Governors are actually pulling off in their states.

NO DIFFERENCE

Cut the programs of the defenseless to give rich fat cats tax cuts.

Submitted by Lafayette on July 9, 2011 - 11:11am.

A MORAL DILEMMA

TH: Ultimately, President Obama’s deal is heavy on spending cuts, light on tax hikes.

Hartmann is quite right. Income Distribution is so warped in favor of the rich that the unfairness is creating an irremediable social divide in the nation.

We are faced with a moral dilemma as regards wealth: When does enough become too much? We have speed limits on highways, but none on accumulated wealth. Why do we have speed limits on highways? Because otherwise people get hurt. The same argument applies to Wealth Accumulation, as has become obvious.

A good question is why? That is, why did Europe after the war decide to install very high taxation as a means of leveling the playing field? My take on an answer to that question is twofold:
* Because Europe had seen only too well that exaggerated riches (during a period of prosperity that preceded the Industrial Age in the latter part of the 19th century) brought with it hideous Income Inequality. Far too many people were living in squalor and a comparative few in splendor. And,
* Because Europe concluded that even with higher income and capital gains taxation, contrary to expectations, innovation and entrepreneurship were not stifled.

MY POINT

A free-market system had historically always produced an unequal distribution of incomes because it was left unfettered. In response to the threat of Communism, Europeans implemented a system of progressive taxation at high levels for the upper incomes. So, going from Income Inequity to Income Fairness is a matter of Income Taxation and Redistribution by means of Public Services for all.

To this day, that notion has worked well. For instance, Europe has amongst the finest National Health Systems and its Educational System graduates high caliber skilled people. (It's only problem is employing them gainfully but that challenge is no different from that of US - no one in Europe saw the consequence of China's opening up to the world.)

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