What's Happened So Far In The Class War Reagan Started in 1981?

Boehner, who signed his pledge, referred to him as a "random person" today

This week, Beltway scold-- and former Wyoming senator-- Alan Simpson (R) was scolding the Republicans on the SuperCommittee.

“Just a quick note about Grover Norquist,” Simpson testified. “If Grover Norquist is now the most powerful man in America, he should run for president. There’s no question about his power. And let me tell you, he has people in thrall. That’s a terrible phrase. Lincoln used it. It means your mind has been captured. You’re in bondage with a soul."

Simpson went on: “So here he is. I asked him. He said, ‘My hero is Ronald Reagan.’ I said, ‘Well, he raised taxes 11 times in his eight years.’ And he said, ‘I know. I didn’t like that at all.’ I said, ‘Well, he did it. Why do you suppose?’ He said, ‘I don’t know. Very disappointing.’ I said, ‘He probably did it to make the country run, another sick idea.’”

Oh, boy... Grover got his weiner whacked. But why should he care? He's already won over and over and over-- and I mean won. Since 1981, when Reagan overtly aligned the government with the interests of the 1% again-- there was that brief New Deal and post-New Deal interregnum-- the rich whose interests Norquist (and the Republican Party and Blue Dogs) champion have scored knock out punch after knock out punch.

[T]he vast majority of the Rich Class really are engaged in a massive cover-up, a widespread conspiracy that includes the Super Rich, Forbes 400 billionaires, Wall Street bank CEOs, all their high-paid Washington lobbyists, all the Congressional puppets they keep in office by spending hundreds of millions on campaign payola and all the conservative presidential candidates praying the same Rich Class dogma.

They’re fighting you, winning big-time, and you’re the loser. It’s just one generation since conservatives put Reagan in office: In those three short decades the income and wealth of the top 1% has tripled while the income of the bottom 99% of all Americans has stagnated or dropped.

Yes, they are at war with you, fighting to gain absolute power over America … and they will never stop their brutal attacks.

...Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

In spite of that unequivocal declaration, Buffett’s Rich Class buddies still want you to believe that it’s the Occupiers, the lazy unemployed, the 99%, someone else, anyone other than their Rich Class that’s fomenting class warfare.

So you need occasional reminders, because the “Rich Class” has been spending mega-bucks for decades to shift responsibility. Fortunately today, folks like the Occupiers aren’t buying the con job. Here’s a few:

Rich Class warriors: puppet-politicians in GOP-controlled Congress

We know the GOP is the Party of the Rich Class. But the Dems are co-conspirators fighting the class war as pawns of the wealthy. No wonder the Occupy Wall Street crowd focuses on the inequality gap between America’s top 1% and the 99% who’ve seen no income growth since the Reaganomics ideology took over American politics. Many are like House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, clones of Ayn Rand’s narcissistic cult of selfish capitalism.
Listen, both parties are singing in harmony: “Yes, there’s class warfare. And yes, it’s our duty to fight for the richest class of capitalists who are making this war. We must help them win, get richer, squeeze more and more out of all Americans.”

Rich Class warriors: Federal Reserve-Wall Street bankers conspiracy

Yes, there are five banks in America that control about 90% of all the deposits … they control over 90% of America’s trading in the $650 trillion global derivatives casino … they control the Federal Reserve through directors and governors … their campaign payola and lobbyists virtually control the presidency, the Senate and Congress … they siphon huge bonuses from depositors, shareholders and pensioners alike:

“So yes, there is a class warfare running our banking system, every day. And yes, the CEOs in our rich class are leading that class war, and winning big. But more in never enough, so we want new ways to skim off profits, because we are invincible, too big and too greedy to fail.”

Rich Class warriors: Pentagon’s Perpetual War-Mongering Machine

The rich class loves war (war profiteering is a big business). Of course they often have to brainwash the 99% with fears like the mushroom-cloud lies Bush-Cheney used to get America into the $3 trillion Iraq War. Americans have a powerful love-hate relationship with war. Why else would we spend almost half our federal budget, several hundred billion dollars, on war every year?

“Yes, there’s class warfare, all right,” the former vice president might say as a one-time defense contractor CEO and oilman who continued profiting in office. He’d obviously admit:
“Yes, we’re in a class war, and it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we proud that we kept winning that war while we was in office.”

Rich Class fighting to turn America back into Reagan’s ol’ Wild West

The list goes on: The Rich Class wants to time-travel America back to a lawless Old Wild West, back to a free-market Reaganomics anarchy where the top 1% trickle down leftovers to the 99% using this kind of self-destructive programs:

• Privatize: Turn Social Security over to Wall Street bankers to run Main Street’s retirements into the dirt (worse than they did in 2008), a $20 trillion blunder that’s guaranteed to trigger total bankruptcy of the America economy.

• Vouchers: Turn our educational and health-care systems into a voucher system so that private companies owned by the Rich Class can siphon off even bigger profits from every little trickle-down bone the wealthy toss to parents, the sick and elderly.

• Regulations: They’ll also turn over environmental, drugs, food, banking and all other regulatory agencies back to be controlled by the very company executives they’re supposed to be regulating, just like Bush and Cheney did for eight years.

• Tax-Free: Extend Bush tax cuts to Rich Class, eliminate estate taxes and give Corporate America another tax–free holiday to return huge foreign profits so they can deposit those profits direct into pockets of the Rich Class.

But, of course, there’s nothing new here. We just forget so easily, because it’s so bad. Which is why we’ll be reminding you often that the Rich Class has been fighting this war against you for 30 years, since Reagan.

And they’re so greedy they cannot stop fighting. So they will likely keep attacking the 99% for another decade, till the 2020 presidential elections, or more likely, till a catastrophic collapse of the economy coming soon.

Yes, folks, America really is under attack daily. We are fighting on the defense in an historic class warfare. Yes, the Rich Class really did start this war. And yes, they really are winning, big-time. And yes, they are addicted to winning at all costs, to get richer and richer just for the sake of getting richer and richer.

They have no conscience about the collateral damage done to the rest of Americans. They’ve lost their moral compass. In short, they will fight this war to the death, yours, theirs, even the death of America. Bet on it: Because more is never enough for America’s morally bankrupt Rich Class.

The Wall Street Journal made a little space on its editorial page yesterday for a non-1%-er, Ralph Nader, no less. He's not talking about guillotines. He's talking about a modest tax of speculation. "Elected representatives," he writes, "have virtually ignored the outrage expressed by protesters on Wall Street and across the country. But the message will keep coming until Congress finally demonstrates that it is listening. A good start would be a tax on financial speculation"-- the kind German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, both conservatives, are pressing on the Euro-zone.

Occupiers throughout the country are pushing elected officials to break the corporate stranglehold on our economy. Both Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) have proposed legislation in the past that would enact a 0.25% tax on the value of stock, bond and derivatives transactions.

But that is far too small. National Nurses United and other progressive groups believe that we would be better served by a rate of 0.5%. This could help curb the wheeling and dealing on Wall Street and raise hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue to help with our country's economic recovery. According to estimates from a 2009 Center for Economic and Policy Research paper, a small tax perhaps ranging from one-half to one-hundredth of a percent, depending upon which financial product is taxed, could reap $350 billion.

This tax offers another significant benefit: It has the potential to curb risky speculative trading that contributes little real economic value. The Capital Institute's John Fullerton has stated that a financial speculation tax could have a significant impact on the high-frequency trading and other "quant" trading strategies that now comprise an astonishing 70% of vastly bloated equity-trading volume. Over the past few decades, trading volume has grown exponentially. In 1995 the total shares of stock traded on the Nasdaq and the NYSE, not including derivatives and other options, was 188 billion. By the peak of the financial crisis, in 2008, this annual number had skyrocketed to three trillion.

Critics argue that this tax would be borne by ordinary investors, retirement funds or mutual funds. But these arguments fall flat when one considers the enormity of speculative trading that occurs in the stock market. Sen. Harkin, Rep. DeFazio and others in the past few years have proposed protecting ordinary investors from the direct effects of the tax by providing exemptions for mutual funds, retirement funds and for the first $100,000 in trades made annually by an individual.

Worth mentioning: DeFazio's Robin Hood tax is hated by the 1%-ers and their hacks-- from Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Fred Upton and John Boehner to Harold Ford, Ben Nelson and Dan Boren-- but you know who really hated Robin Hood? Yes, Ryan's very own personal anti-Jesus, Ayn Rand. And very childhood!

"The thing that Occupy Wall Street has done is give a clear visual image of the policies the three of us have been advocating since the collapse of our economy in 2007," said Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Iowa who joined DeFazio and Harkin at the news conference.

"The simple truth is, this speculation fee we're talking about is simply designed so those who have abused the system are paying to play," he said.

"These super computers are based on timing principles that have no consideration of how these companies are being managed, the shareholders who are being impacted or the employees who work at those companies.

The transaction fee, which the United States levied for decades until it was abolished in 1966, would also raise billions of dollars that could be used to reduce the deficit or for other purposes. DeFazio and Harkin said their current proposal has not yet been "scored" so there are no precise revenue estimates. Independent budget analysts calculated that their 2009 proposal would have raised $150 billion over 10 years.

DeFazio said that the rate he proposes is far lower than existing rates in most developed nations. He mocked arguments that adding the tax would drive investors overseas.

"I'd say 'sure,'" DeFazio said. "If you want to pay a tax that's three-times higher go to Europe."

It's also less than a fee currently being considered by the European Union. For the average worker who, according to federal data, invests $3,400 a year in a 401(k) retirement account, the transaction tax would add a $1 in addition cost each year.

I'm with Nader on this one-- DeFazio isn't asking for even nearly enough.