The Tea Party will be No Party for the Poor and Middle Class

Recently I was directed to a blog owned by a Tea Party activist. I use the term activist to denote the efforts of this blogger to defend the party, as well as reach out to those he'd like to recruit.

In his latest blog entry the blogger supposes that progressives dislike the rich. He enumerates several areas where this dislike manifests itself. After admitting that the "issues" could be anything he lists several:

Healthcare
Internet connections
Housing
Transportation
Food
Power
Influence
Entertainment
Lawyers
Etc, etc, etc,... just fill in the blank.

He sums up his position rather tidily with this statement: "More often than not, whenever there's an issue on their [progressives] radar screen it includes a statement about some perceived unfairness of the rich having something that others do not."

This statement suggests that the progressive movement in this country revolves around class envy--not envy of just anyone, but primarily the rich. The wealthy few, then, is the target of progressives. What the blogger won't admit is that the system is rigged--rigged and tilted heavily toward the rich. Wealth distribution is one indicator, but it doesn't tell the whole story:

The Wealth Distribution

In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home), the top 1%of households had an even greater share: 42.7%. Table 1 and Figure 1 present further details drawn from the careful work of economist Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2010).

Frankly, the poor and the middle class are the ones with the bullseye on their behinds, and the rich are the ones with them in their sight. (Don't you just love these gun metaphors?) If progressives have an objective it's this: to make people relevant again within an economic system that cavalierly, impersonally, and unconscionably, uses and abuses them to enrich their bottom line, and discard them when they don't.

The Nation has an article, titled, "No To Oligarchy." It should be mandatory reading for every American across the full stretch of this nation:

The American people are hurting. As a result of the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street, millions of Americans have lost their jobs, homes, life savings and their ability to get a higher education. Today, some 22 percent of our children live in poverty, and millions more have become dependent on food stamps for their food.

And while the Great Wall Street Recession has devastated the middle class, the truth is that working families have been experiencing a decline for decades. During the Bush years alone, from 2000-2008, median family income dropped by nearly $2,200 and millions lost their health insurance. Today, because of stagnating wages and higher costs for basic necessities, the average two-wage-earner family has less disposable income than a one-wage-earner family did a generation ago. The average American today is underpaid, overworked and stressed out as to what the future will bring for his or her children. For many, the American dream has become a nightmare.

But, not everybody is hurting. While the middle class disappears and poverty increases the wealthiest people in our country are not only doing extremely well, they are using their wealth and political power to protect and expand their very privileged status at the expense of everyone else. This upper-crust of extremely wealthy families are hell-bent on destroying the democratic vision of a strong middle-class which has made the United States the envy of the world. In its place they are determined to create an oligarchy in which a small number of families control the economic and political life of our country.

Progressives aren't about taking from the rich and giving to the poor, but about protecting the common man from the rapacious machinations of those rich few who will stop at nothing to secure their wealth, who will wield their vast wealth as their weapon of choice--a weapon that has been used, and will continue to be used--to consolidate into their hands as much power and control as their wealth will garner.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said in a short story: ''Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.''

To suggest that liberals (as in the Democratic leadership) have a beef with the rich is laughable on its surface. To state further that liberals are seeking a redistribution of wealth by targeting the very rich among us, is laughable still. As long as the rich are rich (a tautology) they will always have the edge when it comes to defeating those occasional legislative policies that might impact their wealth, or, God forbid, have them pay their fair share.

The rich are different from you and me: They have the money to finance their own movement (the Tea Party) in an effort to unshackle themselves from all those oppressive government regulations that were imposed to preserve our environment, regulations that serve only to restrain their wealth-building efforts, and their ability to add further billions to the billions they already have.

How do you do that? You start a movement and finance it. That's what the Koch brothers of the Tea Party movement did:

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States.

The rich are different from you and me: Even when regulatory legislation is passed to rein in their excesses (Wall Street reform), it misses the mark by such a large margin that it might even end up benefiting them, once lawyers, and other Wall Street wizards are invoked, leaving in place "too big to fail," and a worldwide, 600 trillion dollar unregulated derivative market with the excuse, and plaintive wail, that no one understands it--not even the players in that market.

But the most esoteric derivatives - which also are the most profitable for banks to create and trade - have little economic purpose other than to let investors place financial bets, critics say.

A more complex type of derivative helped to inflate the housing bubble in recent years, as Wall Street repackaged high-risk mortgages into securities that speculators could use to bet on the direction of the housing market. Financial institutions earned millions of dollars in fees for creating the securities. But many of the derivatives became worthless when foreclosures skyrocketed, leading to billions of dollars of losses - and taxpayer bailouts - at the banks and insurance companies that owned them.

Now, these obscure and largely unregulated securities - more than $600 trillion of which are tucked into investors' portfolios, according to the Treasury Department - are at the center of the fight over financial reform led by the Obama administration.

I can't think of a more compelling reason for regulating this supposed unregulatable behemoth.

The rich are different from you and me: For all the good things in the healthcare insurance reform law, health insurers aren't going to go broke, but will, by all estimates, grow richer from all those that are now required to have health insurance, even if the government ends up providing subsidies to offset their cost.

Health insurers will benefit due to the following reasons:

1. Additional 32 million Americans will be required to purchase insurance.

2. New restrictions such as the placing of lifetime limits on coverage or denying adults based on pre-existing conditions will not become effective until 2014.

3. Many insurers are expected to raise premiums in order to maintain profits. Recently Anthem Blue Cross raised premiums by as much 39% in California for some customers.

4. Some insurance companies will go out of business since they would not be able to compete under the new regulatory environment and others may merge with the big players leading to a bigger consolidation in the industry.

The five largest health insurers in this country are Aetna(AET), Cigna(CI), Humana (HUM), UnitedHealth Group(UNH) and Wellpoint(WLP).

Despite this mostly rosy picture for health insurers, this hasn't stopped Republicans and Tea Partiers from expending congressional energy and time in repealing this "job killing legislation."

The rich are different from you and me: They get bailed out with the use of billions of taxpayer dollars, but the extension of unemployment insurance to millions of the unemployed is met with cries of socialism, the coddling of the lazy who would, were it not for this insurance, busy themselves in finding meaningful employment.

A certain Tea Party member takes umbrage at the accusation that the Tea Party supported, or, at the least, tolerated the bail out of banks, yet the first order of business in this new congress, comprised of many Tea Party-elected legislators, is not to rescind these bailouts (at least those not already repaid), but to repeal health insurance reform--notwithstanding the millions of Americans who go without health insurance annually, or who, because of pre-existing conditions, don't qualify, or who, because of a catastrophic illness, is forced to spend all that they have, fixed as well as liquid assets, toward their health care, or that of a family member.

Republicans and Tea Partiers have no compunction when it comes to lowering the hammer on the lives and welfare of taxpayers (the "low-hanging fruit"), while the rich and the powerful are advocated for with full press--the extension of the Bush tax cuts which will increase this nation's deficit hole, although economists are mostly in agreement that such an extension will do little to stimulate our lethargic economy.

The goal of the Tea Party is to pare down the size of government, to eviscerate it--a move that will result in a huge loss of federal jobs from what they consider the non-productive sector of society. Such a paring will achieve two objectives: Corporations can then divest themselves of those onerous regulations imposed by the FDA, the USDA, and the EPA, and other alphabet-soup agencies. Apparently, not even the the FBI, the DEA or the CIA are exempt. Another goal is to shift power to the states. By reducing the size of the federal government, power will be decentralized sufficiently to allow states to have the upper hand--a provision that will put blacks and other minorities at the mercy of state and local governments, and subject them to their legislative whims.

The 1980 presidential campaign provides us with a glimpse. In 1980 David Koch ran as the vice presidential candidate on the Libertarian ticket. In his campaign, he advocated for the abolishment of social security, welfare, the FBI, the CIA, public schools, and finally, federal regulatory agencies.

This will allow the Tea Party to "take their country back," as well as roll the clock back, which has been their objective all along.

The rich are different from you and me: And the difference is the difference that money makes. And if Republicans and some Democrats have their way, this difference will, in all likelihood, continue indefinitely.

So it appears that the rich, after all, have "something that others do not." They have ownership of the government. They have ownership of the courts (recent Supreme Court rulings make this clear). And they have ownership of most of the money generated in this country, and the power that accompanies such ownership.