GOP Wages Class Warfare - by Ben Harvey

This past few days I have taken a step back to reflect. The focus of my reflection is the Republican propaganda attack machine. Currently, the targets of this vast right wing conspiracy (thank you Hillary Clinton) are Unions, public workers and their collective bargaining powers.

I am not one to easily subscribe to conspiracy theories, however, thanks to the prank call received by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, we learned about the role of right wing billionaire David Koch (pronounced Coke).

Walker, led to believe the caller was Koch, his major campaign contributor, let down his guard and revealed that Union busting is an organized and well financed GOP plan. Under the guise of addressing the budget crisis, Republicans are waging class war against public workers, teachers, police departments and in general the middle-class.

And the agenda seems to be to gut, destroy and eliminate the American middle-class. In Wisconsin, after Walker approved huge business tax cuts, he is promoting legislation to destroy the right of collective bargaining of unions - even though the Union agreed to concessions affecting their heatlh care and pension plans.

In New Jersey, Indiana, Florida, Iowa, Virginia, Texas, Mississippi and many other GOP led states, governors have openly taken a hostile stand against labor while cuddling up to big business.

In our federal government, the House - with the new Republican majority - after giving enormous tax breaks to billionaires, is demanding huge budget cuts to programs that hurt the poor and middle-class. Once again, under the guise of being fiscally prudent.

Both federal and state governments are facing severe economic shortfalls. Tough challenges and decisions have to be made to restore fiscal sanity. But our deficits are not because of federal funding for Sesame Street and other PBS programs. Nor are our deficits from providing the vastly underpaid teachers with a decent salary.

The root problems of our deficits is our stubborn addiction to oil - this addiction causes us to fight wars we can not afford and for us to maintain a bloated defense budget.

Second, our enormous trade deficits - we are a nation of consumers, we consume over 700 billion dollars more than we produce (that is a huge annual transfer of money out of our country).

Finally, our Reaganomic economy supply side philosophy - reducing taxes for big business and the wealthiest people in order to stimulate economic growth. This has only resulted in the hoarding of wealth by the rich and the shrinking of the middle-class.

The top 10% of our country own 71% of the wealth and the top 1% own 40% of the wealth in our country.

This leads to the question: Is it far-fetched to believe what we see in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya can happen in USA? Just look at the protests in Wisconsin leads one to believe it could happen here, especially if the powers to be want our budget deficits to be only balanced on the back of the little guy or gal!