If the Right wants to cry about class warfare, we should give them something to cry about.

[xchrom]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/chicken-littles-of-the-right/



The crybabies at the American Spectator have put out their new cover, a heaping load of hysteria that equates a proposal to raise taxes to a death sentence for … is that Uncle Pennybags from Monopoly?

That these hacks don’t hesitate to take up the sartorial mantle of Jazz Age plutocrats says a lot about the Right’s self-image. But as someone who writes for a magazine who uses the National Razor as part of its branding, I feel moved to respond.

Of course, this cover is just the latest in Piketty-mania: everyone in publishing wants to get a piece of the sensation who can sell a bunch of books without featuring a single mythological creature (outside his definition of capital). Piketty says what everyone who’s been paying attention has known — has felt in their bones — for years: the rich are getting richer. But they’re also getting more brazen, and that’s caused the few remaining well-heeled with consciences to cast nervous glances over their shoulders.

So that trickle of piss running down James Piereson’s leg and pooling in his wingtip is another iteration of billionaire victimology, just another boring maneuver from the Reagan playbook that kids these days are totally over. Yes, after the massive heist of the financial crisis of 2008, exactly one Wall Street executive, Kareem Serageldin, is heading to jail, while thousands of victims head to homeless shelters and soup kitchens. Serageldin’s Christ-like gesture: to do 30 months for the sins of the financial elite.

[devils chaplain]

1. Warfare? Maybe like Germany v. Poland, 1939

It's been a little one sided.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

2. When they take from you, it's 'entrepreneurship', 'capitalism',

'savvy business practices'. When you want to take it back, it's 'confiscation'.

[socialist_n_TN]

5. I don't care what THEY call it.......

as long as it's done.

[jeff47]

3. This scale of inequality isn't sustainable.

Inequality this large has always collapsed. There's two ways it can collapse.

An example of the first way is the New Deal. Policies, taxes and laws change to favor the lower and middle class over the wealthy, bringing down inequality in a relatively controlled manner that still allows the wealthy to be the wealthy.

The second way involves guillotines or communist revolutions. Inequality is corrected by massive violence that results in the wealthy being slaughtered. After a lot of chaos, upheaval and death, inequality is smaller.

By blocking the first path, the wealthy are making the second path inevitable.

[Martin Eden]

4. Do the One Percent want REAL confiscation & violence?

If not, they should be amenable to policies that foster a healthy middle class -- like the tax rates when Ike was prez and our economy was booming.

Otherwise, the peasants will ultimately revolt. Ask the Czar and his family how that worked out for them.