Below is an quote of Bill Moyers, a respected PBS journalist. I can
only suggest that those who disagree with this are those who are in
the upper 20% income group of the U.S. population or are in the
gullible catagory that Moyers mentions. I also surmise that even IF
they post a disagreement that they will be unable to offer anything
factual to back it up. ---
Dale

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This is the Fight of Our Lives.

by Bill Moyers

"Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington
today. Not the
fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in
any other
industrial nation; not the fact that millions of workers are actually
making
less money today in real dollars than they did twenty years ago; not
the fact
that working people are putting in longer and longer hours and still
falling
behind; not the fact that while we have the most advanced medical
care in the
world, nearly 44 million Americans -- eight out of ten of them in
working
families -- are uninsured and cannot get the basic care they need.

Astonishing as it seems, no one in official Washington seems
embarrassed by the
fact that the gap between rich and poor is greater than it's been in
50 years --
the worst inequality among all western nations. Or that we are
experiencing a
shift in poverty. For years it was said those people down there at
the bottom
were single, jobless mothers. For years they were told work,
education, and
marriage is how they move up the economic ladder. But poverty is
showing up
where we didn't expect it -- among families that include two parents,
a worker,
and a head of the household with more than a high school education.
These are
the newly poor. Our political, financial and business class expects
them to
climb out of poverty . . on an escalator moving downward.

By the end of the decade most Americans were running harder but
slipping behind,
and the gap between them and prosperous America was widening.

What turns their personal tragedy into a political travesty is that
the vast
majority of them are very patriotic. They love this country. But they
no
longer believe they matter to the people who run the country. Yet, by
the end
of the decade most of them were no longer paying attention to
politics. They
don't see it connecting to their lives. They don't think their
concerns will
ever be addressed by the political, corporate, and media elites who
make up our
dominant class. They are not cynical, because they are deeply
religious people
with no capacity for cynicism, but they know the system is rigged
against them.
They know this, and we know this. For years now a small fraction of
American
households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and
income
while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained
unprecedented
levels of economic and political power over daily life. In 1960, the
gap in
terms of wealth between the top 20% and the bottom 20%
was 30-fold. Four decades later it is more than 75-fold.

VCRs and television sets are cheap, but higher education, health
care, public
transportation, drugs, housing and cars have risen faster in price
than typical
family incomes. And life has grown neither calm nor secure for most
Americans,
by any means." You can find many sources to support this conclusion.
I like the
language of a small outfit here in New York called the Commonwealth
Foundation/Center for the Renewal of American Democracy. They
conclude that
working families and the poor "are losing ground under economic
pressures that
deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility,
political
participation, and civic life."

We could prevent the polarization between the very rich and the very
poor that
poisoned other societies. We could provide that each and every
citizen would
enjoy the basic necessities of life, a voice in the system of self-
government,
and a better chance for their children. We could preclude the vast
divides that
produced the turmoil and tyranny of the very countries from which so
many of our
families had fled.

Historically, through a system of checks and balances we Americans
were going to
maintain a safe, if shifting, equilibrium between wealth and
commonwealth. We
believed equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of any
democracy.
So early on, primary schooling was made free to all. States changed
laws to
protect debtors, often the relatively poor, against their rich
creditors.
Charters to establish corporations were open to most, if not all,
white comers,
rather than held for the elite. The government encouraged Americans
to own
their own piece of land, and even supported squatters' rights. The
court
challenged monopoly -- all in the name of we the people.

But then class war was declared, a generation ago, in a powerful
polemic by
William Simon, who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury. He
called on the
financial and business class, in effect, to take back the power and
privileges
they had lost in the Depression and new deal. They got the message,
and soon
they began a stealthy class war against the rest of society and the
principles
of our democracy. They set out to trash the social contract, to cut
their
workforces and wages, to scour the globe in search of cheap labor,
and to shred
the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from
hardships beyond
their control. Business Week put it bluntly at the time: "Some people
will
obviously have to do with less....it will be a bitter pill for many
Americans to
swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have
more."

The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to
them is the
consequence of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand." This is a lie. What's
happening
to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual
propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for
government
subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political
decisions
favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political
system right
out from under us.

Thomas Edsall of The Washington Post wrote: "During the 1970s,
business refined
its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in
favor of
joint, cooperate action in the legislative area." Big business
political action
committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And
they built
alliances with the religious right -- Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority
and Pat
Robertson's Christian Coalition -- who mounted a cultural war
providing a
smokescreen for the class war, hiding the economic plunder of the
very people
who were enlisted as foot soldiers in the cause of privilege.

Look at the spoils of victory:

Over the past THREE YEARS, they've pushed through $2 trillion dollars
in tax
cuts -- almost all tilted towards the wealthiest people in the
country.

Cuts in taxes on the largest incomes.

Cuts in taxes on investment income.

And cuts in taxes on huge inheritances.

More than half of the benefits are going to the wealthiest one
percent. You
could call it trickle-down economics, except that the only thing that
trickled
down was a sea of red ink in our state and local governments, forcing
them to
cut services for and raise taxes on middle class working America.

Now the Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits totaling $2.75
trillion
over the next ten years.

These deficits have been part of their strategy. Some of you will
remember that
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to warn us 20 years ago, when
he predicted
that President Ronald Reagan's real strategy was to force the
government to cut
domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic
dimensions.
Reagan's own budget director, David Stockman, admitted as such. Now
the leading
rightwing political strategist, Grover Norquist, says the goal is
to "starve the
beast" -- with trillions of dollars in deficits resulting from
trillions of
dollars in tax cuts, until the United States Government is so anemic
and
anorexic it can be drowned in the bathtub.

There's no question about it: The corporate conservatives and their
allies in
the political and religious right are achieving a vast transformation
of
American life that only they understand because they are its
advocates, its
architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic
inequality
in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and
our cities
and counties with structural deficits that will last until our
children's
children are ready for retirement, and they are systematically
stripping
government of all its functions except rewarding the rich and waging
war.

And they are proud of what they have done to our economy and our
society. If
instead of practicing journalism I was writing for Saturday Night
Live, I
couldn't have made up the things that this crew have been saying. The
president's chief economic adviser says shipping technical and
professional jobs
overseas is good for the economy. The president's Council of Economic
Advisers
report that hamburger chefs in fast food restaurants can be
considered
manufacturing workers. The president's Federal Reserve Chairman says
that the
tax cuts may force cutbacks in social security - but hey, we should
make the tax
cuts permanent anyway. The president's Labor Secretary says it
doesn't matter
if job growth has stalled because "the stock market is the ultimate
arbiter."

You just can't make this stuff up. You have to hear it to believe it.
This may
be the first class war in history where the victims will die
laughing.

What we have here is a nationwide scheme to rip off the government
and the poor.

Let's face the reality: If ripping off the public trust; if
distributing tax
breaks to the wealthy at the expense of the poor; if driving the
country into
deficits deliberately to starve social benefits; if requiring states
to balance
their budgets on the backs of the poor; if squeezing the wages of
workers until
the labor force resembles a nation of serfs -- if this isn't class
war, what is?

It's un-American. It's unpatriotic. And it's wrong.

What we need is a mass movement of people like you. Get mad, yes --
there's
plenty to be mad about. Then get organized and get busy. This is the
fight of
our lives.