Guns and butter: The oligarchs against the people on two big issues

[Starboard Tack]

There are numerous parallels between the battle over gun safety and the battle over preserving the US welfare state.

In America, as in Tunisia, Egypt and throughout the Arab world, the battle of the age pits the insular power of oligarchs against the great mass of the people. This holiday season in America, that battle is most evident on two seemingly quite different fronts. One front is the battle over guns in the form of seeking gun safety laws to stem the plague of gun deaths America suffers from. The other front is the battle over butter - the generic term for material sustenance - in the form of Tea Party-inspired attacks on America's already notoriously weak and undersized welfare state.

The latter battle is considerably obscured behind layers of political warfare back and forth over the past two years and more. But make no mistake, while the Democrats simply want some rather limited tax increases - returning to the Clinton-era rates for a tiny sliver of high-income Americans - what Republicans are after is a systematic dismantling of the welfare state, turning public programmes like Social Security and Medicare into private programmes, with the federal government staying on as the collection agency only.

More at link http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/20131195115777478.html

Very insightful piece.

[samsingh]

1. i think the $400k barrier is a good one, as well as

caps on deductions.

[Remmah2]

2. Do you need a cap gun for that?

[samsingh]

3. what do you mean?

[jody]

4. One is a right preexisting our Constitution & the other is a privilege granted by a simple majority.

[gejohnston]

5. I'm missing the gun angle here

because based on the polls, the mass of people don't support that much gun control. Most of the calls for gun control are coming from oligarchs, including their over paid and under qualified pundits in the corporate, owned by said oligarchs. That isn't to say that there are 99 percenters for it and oligarchs against it. I'm saying those two groups are not major players.

[GreenStormCloud]

6. The 1%ers already have their guns, & armed guards.

They want to keep them away from us 99%ers.

[gejohnston]

7. I think this tag line puts it best

if anyone has studied labor history in the US
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014355733#post9