A New Look at the Left Wing

We’re in a class war.

It’s the corporations and the very wealthiest against all the rest of us.

We’re losing.

In 1962 the wealthiest 1% of American households had 125 times the wealth of the median household. Now it’s 190 times as much.

Is that a case of a rising tide lifting all boats, just a few of them a little bit higher?

No.

When people accuse the left of ‘encouraging class warfare,’ just remember that it wasn’t our fight to choose.

Upper-class people are less adept at reading other people’s emotions than their lower-class counterparts, according to a new study published in the journal Psychological Science.

“We found that people from a lower-class background – in terms of occupation, status, education and income level – performed better in terms of emotional intelligence, the ability to read the emotions that others are feeling,” says Michael Kraus, co-author of the study and a postdoctoral student in psychology at the University of California, San Francisco.

In other words, if you’re looking for a little empathy, you’re more likely to get it from a poor person than a rich one (just ask Bob Cratchit)

The donation of $100 million by Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg to the Newark school system is a small episode that reveals something fundamental about American society.

The move, lauded uncritically by the American media, embodies and further enshrines the principle that has come to prevail in the US in recent years: if the population is to have access to education, culture and technology, indispensable for life in a modern society, it will be at the whim of the very rich. Any conception of social rights residing inalienably in the people is rejected by the ruling elite and its political and media apologists.

This is, in effect, the return of the aristocratic principle. Under the old regime, the population was essentially at the mercy of the great ones in society, who bestowed—or did not bestow—favors and gifts as they saw fit.

The democratic revolutions of the 18^th and 19^th centuries were influenced by the notion of the social contract—that a society arises out of the desire of people to live together for their mutual benefit. The government and its officials, according to the ideologists of the bourgeois revolution, were delegated to act as the representatives of society as a whole, with the people retaining the ultimate sovereignty.

In the 19^th century in the US, liberal and socialist-influenced reformers took up the battle for public education as a social right, seeing it, in part, as a defense of the republican form of government against European monarchies and nobilities. The emergence of the working class and its struggles gave the fight for universal education a new significance.

All of that is now being reversed. The availability of decent public schools, public libraries, orchestras and other cultural and educational institutions is more and more reduced to the level of a privilege, which the financial elite can provide or not, as it chooses. The wealthy few buy and sell, set up or close down, these socially vital services according to their financial health and individual mindset.

The population is encouraged by the media and the political system to look on these billionaire benefactors as heroes, as their superiors in every fashion, to whom deference should and must be shown.

The notion that the government has a responsibility to educate children, once held up as a sign of America’s democratic greatness, is now brushed aside in practice by both big business parties and the corporate elite. The aristocracy that rules America today, and we use the term advisedly, treats the population as a collection of peons who should consider themselves lucky if a benevolent billionaire happens to glance kindly on them.

And so we get the large sums being handed out by Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and now Facebook’s Zuckerberg, a billionaire at 26 and the 35^th richest person in America, according to Forbes magazine’s new list. Whether the donations soothe the consciences of these gentlemen or not, the money will have no measurable impact on America’s crumbling infrastructure. The latter requires the application of a massive, coordinated social effort, involving the expenditure of trillions of dollars, which will be possible only as the result of radical wealth redistribution and changes in social policy.

The rich giving away a share of their ill-gotten gains has an infamous and odorous history. Various Robber Barons contributed considerable sums to good works, depending on their piety and concerns about the afterlife. John D. Rockefeller, who had miners and their families shot down in Colorado, handed out dimes to the poor. Frederick Engels long ago denounced the wealthy, “self-complacent” philanthropists who “give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them!”

Charity is degrading to those who receive it and those who bestow it. It inevitably demands that the oppressed feel gratitude toward their oppressors, and generally encourages slavishness. Socialism, on the other hand, urges a relentless struggle against existing social ills and works toward eliminating the poverty and misery that are the preconditions for charity. The philanthropists’ “remedies,” as Oscar Wilde pointed out, “do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.”

jhnbrssndn:

The cry that goes out whenever a fair tax redistribution system is suggested that if one was implemented the rich would leave the country in droves. The implication being that we either could not function without them and that our economy and our society would crumble. Is this really the case? The facts would point to a completely different picture.

Figures derived from the HM Revenues & Customs report show that the majority earn most of the wages in Scotland.

However, the top 7.7% of earners take home 26% of the total  wage pot. Would increasing their taxes make them all leave the country? This is very doubtful as there would not be sufficient jobs, there are 193,000 of them, which pay this level of these wages in other countries. These people have family and cultural ties that would make them not want to leave Scotland on this scale. The other interesting thing about this table is that the top 20,000 of earners take home about £4 billion before tax a year.Yet the richest 100 Scots have a personal wealth of over £16 billion.

This rich elite are contributing very little  to the country through earnings and taxation.  It would be them that had the financial ability and incentive to up sticks and leave but losing them would be no real financial loss to the country. But we would want to hit them with a one off 10% tax on their wealth before they could scarper. They have benefited from a massive redistribution of wealth over the last thirty years that has seen the liquid wealth of the bottom 50% of society fall from 12%  to 1%  while the top 0.01% have seen their incomes go up by 500% in the same period. This income inequality goes much deeper with the top 20% of households earning 15 times the bottom 20% of households (£73,800 to £5,000). The rise of credit over the last three decades that resulted in the great credit bubble is largely down to this redistribution of wealth. How else could we pay for anything?

(Source: jhnbrssndn)

New Rule: The next rich person who publicly complains about being vilified by the Obama administration must be publicly vilified by the Obama administration. It’s so hard for one person to tell another person what constitutes being “rich”, or what tax rate is “too much.” But I’ve done some math that indicates that, considering the hole this country is in, if you are earning more than a million dollars a year and are complaining about a 3.6% tax increase, then you are by definition a greedy asshole.