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Are we asking the poor and middle class to eat cake?


By Colin Benjamin Last Saturday, thousands of Americans de-


scended on Washington to march for jobs, jus- tice and education, as Republicans advocated continuing Bush’s tax cuts for their wealthy cronies.


Judging by recent reports, showing Ameri-


ca’s growing economic disparity between rich and poor, it is clear we must continue to march and battle these forces promoting economic in- equality.


According to the Joint Economic Committee


(JEC), the latest Census figures found the gap between the rich and poor reached it widest point in America last year, since data has been collected. The JEC analysis highlights several startling facts including: 1) “Income inequal- ity has skyrocketed” and “Economists concur that income inequality has risen dramatically over the past three decades.” 2) “Middle-class incomes stagnated under President Bush.” 3) “Income inequality may be the root cause of the Great Recession,” which started in 2007. 4) “High levels of income inequality may pre- cipitate economic crises” because “Peaks in income inequality preceded both the Great De- pression and the Great Recession, suggesting that high levels of income inequality may de- stabilize the economy as a whole.”


The report pointed out a substantial propor-


tion of this rising inequality was “driven by the share of total income accrued by the richest 1 percent of households. Between 1980 and 2008, their share rose from 10.0 percent to 21.0 percent, making the United States as one of the most unequal countries in the world.” The report also found “The Bush years were es- pecially hard on the middle class, particularly when compared to the gains seen by middle income Americans during the Clinton Admin- istration.”


The findings show the richest 10 percent


control nearly 50 percent of the nation’s income.


Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney


(D-NY) declared “Tragically, the Bush economic legacy is greater inequality, a weakening middle class and the worst recession in more than 75 years.”


Given these awful numbers, one would think


politicians would be focusing on the plight of regular Americans. Instead, Republicans — with some wimpy Democrats — are blocking President Obama’s desire to end the tax-break for the wealthy. You see, Republicans want tax breaks for billionaires and multi-millionaires, who represent two percent of the population.


These “responsible” Republicans, who lec-


ture us on fiscal responsibility, want $700 billion in taxpayer money given to the super rich. That’s another $100 thousand extra for these elites. But while Republicans are fight- ing for their rich friends, why aren’t they talk- ing about the 41 million Americans now using


food stamps? Why aren’t they saying anything about the 43 million Americans now classi- fied as poor? Keep in mind, outmoded federal guidelines do not consider a family of four poor making $23,000 annually poor.


Given their utter disregard for average work-


ing Americans, one would think Republicans would be trounced, again, in November. Yet, ac- cording to polls and political punditry, Demo- crats may well lose control of the House and Senate. How can that be?


True, many Democrats leave much to be de-


sired, especially when they continually bend over to appease Republicans. Unfortunately, the corruption of big money — made worse by this year’s Supreme Court ruling in the Citi- zens United Case — along with the self-serv- ing divisiveness of party politics obstructs the democratic will of the people. This is why we must return to the activism we used to elect President Obama. Continued organization and mass mobilization against the forces of preju- dice and economic elitism is imperative. Many forgot that the American government isn’t a monarchy. We still have Republicans like John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Jeff Sessions running interference in the Congress.


Moreover, while we’ve slumbered Tea Party


crackpots and their phony “grassroots” move- ment — funded by billionaires like the Koch brothers — have been rising with their reviling racist rants about “taking the country back.” The thought of a Black man in the White House has these people descending off the deep end. Why else are so many deluding themselves into believing President Obama isn’t Christian or American?


Where were these Tea Party “patriots” when


Bush’s White House was destroying America, with war-for-profit schemes and the same tax- break-for-the-rich policies Republicans are now espousing? How many jobs did this policy created during Bush’s two terms?


The truth is, Republicans only care about per-


sonal political goals and rich campaign donors. A March Forbes magazine article stated, “Last year’s wealth wasteland has become a billion- aire bonanza, as most of the richest people on the planet have seen their fortunes soar in the past 12 months.”


How much of these tax-breaks, for million-


aires and billionaires, will be rerouted into Re- publican campaign contributions?


The last two years, Republicans said no to


everything President Obama proposed. Assist- ing President Obama, helping America, doesn’t facilitate their agenda to reclaim power. Repub- licans have calculated that the rabid racism of a segment of White America — including the Republican base and Tea Party buffoons — is beneficial to their efforts at opposing President Obama.


In November, we must teach these people another lesson.


The class contradictions of the Tea Party


By Tonyaa Weathersbee For a brief moment in 2008, we caught a


glimpse of the madness that some White folks would be driven to if a Black man managed to make it into the White House.


In October of that year, the Bureau of Alco-


hol, Tobacco and Firearms uncovered plans by two neo-Nazis to assassinate then-candi- date Barack Obama and gun down hundreds of Black students in Tennessee.


Those plans, of course, were foiled — and


as criminals, the neo-Nazi nuts who planned it would have flunked out of pre-school.


Still, that discovery accelerated fears among


Black people that a President Obama might meet the same fate as President Kennedy.


Two years have passed. And now, when


it comes to thwarting Obama’s presidency, it seems that fears of yokels wielding guns and slurs are badly misplaced — compared to where the real threat is coming from.


The real threat is coming from ultra-conser-


vative moguls and their cohorts wielding check- books, moguls who are using their money to exploit broke White people who see the ascen- dancy of Obama as a threat to their privilege.


Such moguls would be people such as the


Koch brothers. According to The New Yorker, the billion-


aires have funded numerous campaigns against Obama administration policies — especially health care and climate change legislation. They believe that poor people should get little government help. And their foundation, Ameri- cans for Prosperity, has been working to fund Tea Party activities since Day One.


As we all know, the Tea Party is a move-


ment of mostly White people, people who were silent when George W. Bush was running up the deficit from waging unnecessary wars, but who found their voice when Obama dared to fix health care. They got loud when a president tried to do something to enhance American lives rather than hasten American deaths.


Then there’s Rupert Murdoch, owner of News


Corporation, which owns Fox News, which airs endless reports designed not to inform as much as to inflame a false sense of victimhood among Whites if they don’t stop Obama.


That’s why it continued to air footage of


members of the New Black Panther Party at a polling site in Philadelphia — even though it


was proven that they didn’t scare anyone into not voting and even though it was the Bush Jus- tice Department, and not Obama’s, that down- graded the charges to civil instead of criminal.


And that’s why it has virtually every potential


Republican presidential candidate — including Tea Party darling Sarah Palin — on its payroll contributing to the morass of lies and misrep- resentations designed to demonize Obama, to make White people believe that they are under siege.


That’s not all. FreedomWorks, an organization that coordi-


nates and funds Tea Party activities, is headed by former GOP congressman Dick Armey. But even though it bills itself as a grassroots orga- nization, it receives a good share of its funding from corporations such as tobacco giant Phil- lip Morris.


It has also received money from the Scaife


foundations, which have funded ultra-right wing causes for decades, including some, like the Federalist Society, which have favored roll- ing back some civil rights laws.


That’s the stealth attack on Obama’s presi-


dency that is being waged now. Except that the ones with the biggest guns aren’t the ones who show up to anti-Obama rallies strapped, or inept neo-Nazi would-be assassins, but the bil- lionaires who are bankrolling the movements to get Tea Partiers and other assorted rubes to do their dirty work for them.


That would explain the elderly White couple


who Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi inter- viewed at a Palin-led Tea Party rally in Ken- tucky. There was the wife, sitting in a Medi- care-funded motor scooter — yet her husband, a retired tax assessor, had the gall to rant about too many people living off the government.


Unbelievable. But while the anti-Obama billionaires have


their Tea Party dupes, the Black people and the young people who helped Obama win still have the most potent weapon there is —the vote.


It’s the weapon that they need to wield


during the mid-term elections, because even though Obama hasn’t lived up to every promise he’s made, he’s not being backed by entities that have a history of supporting policies and ideologies that have hurt Black people. And who are itching to elect a Congress that will help history repeat itself.


Obama deserves the respect of the office


By Michael Cottman President Barack Obama gets no respect. Even as Republicans vow to repeal Obama’s


sweeping health care law leading up to the cru- cial mid-term elections in November, one Re- publican candidate, Paul LePage, says if he’s elected governor of Maine, he plans to say to Obama, “Go to hell.”


LePage, who is backed by the conservative


Tea Party movement, spoke at a Republican forum last week while stumping for votes.


“And as your governor,” LePage told the


crowd, you’re gonna be seeing a lot of me on the front page saying ‘Gov. LePage tells Obama to go to hell.’”


Why was that kind of profanity necessary?


Who knows? It’s tough talk from LePage, a Republican hothead who not only disrespects Obama with his hateful comments, but also disrespects the office of the president.


Because Obama is America’s first Black


president, there is a question about whether LePage lashed out about Obama, in part, be- cause he’s Black. Would LePage have told a White president, who was a Democrat, to “go to hell”?


What’s clear is this: There will always be


ideological differences between Democrats and Republicans, but the Tea Party’s criticism of Obama’s policies usually turn ugly.


“If this is his attitude towards the president


of the United States, I can’t imagine what he would say when a local legislator or constitu- ent disagrees with him,” Arden Manning, who heads the Democrats’ Victory 2010 campaign, said in a statement.


LePage, like many other Republicans, is crit-


ical of Obama’s economic recovery efforts and reminds the administration that the nation’s unemployment rate is stuck at 9.5 percent.


On Monday, Obama tried to counter the


GOP’s assault and announced an initiative called Skills for America’s Future, a new, in- dustry-led plan to substantially improve indus- try partnerships with community colleges and build a nationwide network to create jobs.


“We want to make it easier to join students


looking for jobs with businesses looking to hire,” Obama said at the White House Monday. “We want to put community colleges and em- ployers together to create programs that match curricula in the classroom with the needs of the boardroom. Skills for America’s Future would help connect more employers, schools and


Michael Cottman


other job training providers, and help them share knowledge about what practices work best.”


As part of this effort, the Presi- dent’s Economic Recovery Advi- sory Board con- ducted outreach to private sector employers, labor leaders, philan- thropy organiza- tions, and policy


leaders within the administration to solicit views on workforce development challenges. For example, McDonald’s will double its accel- erated professional literacy program over the next 18 months, reaching an additional 1,000 McDonald’s managers in 30 sites across the country.


The program, which includes a series of


four courses (210 curriculum hours) has won numerous awards, and leverages “virtual class- room” technology that allows rapid scale-up.


In addition to expanding the program,


McDonald’s also will make its “virtual class- room” model available to community colleges. And Gap Inc. will expand its community college partnerships by launching a new program with community colleges in seven cities. The effort will include in-store job shadowing, interview and leadership training, and scholarships. Gap expects to hire 1,200 students from community colleges in 2011, representing 5 percent of its annual hiring.


“And so I’ve said that by the year 2020, I


want to see an additional five million communi- ty college degrees and certificates in America,” Obama said. “To reach this goal, we’re making an unprecedented investment in our commu- nity colleges — upgrading them, modernizing them and challenging these schools to pursue innovative, research-oriented approaches to educating.”


Only time will tell if Obama’s recovery efforts


will be successful, but in the meantime, the president deserves the respect of the elector- ate — which includes Republicans like LePage — while Obama tries to fix a monumental mess he inherited from another misguided Republi- can, George W. Bush.


Whining Democrats


By David Sirota The way Democratic leaders tell it, their


party’s current “enthusiasm gap” comes from rank-and-file voters who are irrational and pes- simistic complainers.


“Democrats, just congenitally, tend to (see)


the glass as half empty,” President Obama said last month during a $30,000-a-plate fundraiser at the Connecticut home of a donor named (no joke) Rich Richman. Days later, Vice President Biden told a separate audience of donors that voters need “to stop whining.”


Apparently, the two believe that a mix of


Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake” motto and Phil Gramm’s “nation of whiners” mantra will excite the Democratic base.


Who knows? Maybe it’ll work. But probably


not. The sight of Washington politicians attend- ing fat-cat fundraisers while berating a reces- sion-hammered nation is not exactly inspiring. It’s more like a recipe for electoral backlash.


That said, this campaign season is defined


neither by unreasonable petulance, as the White House asserts, nor by justifiable rage against the plutocratic machine.


Instead, the moment is all about the more


muted despondence expressed by that recent CNBC town hall speaker — the one who told the president that voters are “exhausted” and “deeply disappointed” in his administration.


The desperation is understandable. The Iraq


War continues, and the Afghanistan War is in- tensifying. The Wall Street “reform” bill has been exposed as a sham, with the Associated Press reporting that banks are already planning to exploit the new rules for even more profits. Meanwhile, Obama aides admit that the new health care legislation coddles the industries it purports to regulate.


“During the campaign we fought against


insurance companies,” White House adviser David Axelrod said about the Obama-crafted bill. “(But) after the deals with insurance com- panies, the deals with Pharma — all these people are supposedly our friends.”


As Axelrod’s comment implies, this is not


“real change” or “yes we can” — it’s the demor- alizing status quo of “no we won’t.” And few disappointments better underscore that reality


than the recent non-debate over the Bush tax cuts.


Since those tax reductions were enacted,


Democrats have — rightly — criticized them as ineffective economic policy that unduly ex- pands the national debt. The data support the allegations: The Bush tax-cut years were “one of the weakest eight-year spans for the U.S. economy in decades,” according to The Wash- ington Post, and the tax cuts are the single largest factor in the deficit, according to the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Pri- orities.


Americans understand these facts, as evi-


denced by polls showing majority support for eliminating the specific tax cuts that benefit the wealthy. In fact, when considering both public opinion and Democrats’ previous criticism of Bush’s tax policy, it’s clear that opposition to the Bush tax cuts was a primary reason voters elected Democrats in the first place.


And yet, the White House and Democratic


congressional leaders announced they are postponing any legislation that might perma- nently modify the Bush tax cuts.


That’s right, we’re not talking about Demo-


crats deliberately letting all the cuts expire — Democratic lawmakers say they will extend the cuts for the middle class. The issue is whether they will simultaneously deliver on promises to terminate the tax cuts that apply to income above $200,000. On that pledge, the party is now blocking a vote.


No doubt, Democratic politicians would have


us believe that Republican obstructionism makes a vote pointless and that those saying otherwise are back to “glass half empty” whin- ing.


This, of course, has been the same excuse


on nearly every issue. But who are the self-defeating whiners here


— politicians who don’t even attempt to fulfill their own promises, or voters who expect those politicians to at least make a minimal effort?


The honest answer to that question shows


who is really responsible for the enthusiasm gap.


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