January 09, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

TIME TO REPRESENT WORKING PEOPLE

Since the early 1970's the working class in the United States has been hammered by the economic policies of the federal government. Right-wingers have often screeched about "class warfare" and offer up statistics about the percentage of taxes paid by the rich. You would think, from their rhetoric, that the rest of us are just getting a free ride on taxes and sailing merrily along. Instead, we've seen a growing economic gulf between the very rich and everyone else. Despite rising productivity, most working people aren't getting ahead. The social contract has been thrown overboard and left to drown. It's time for the Democratic party to represent its core constituency, working people, and push policies that will benefit the vast majority of us who work for wages. This article by Bob Burnett is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

For the past six years, the ultra-conservative Bush Administration waged war on America's working families. Monday's New York Times provided fresh evidence of this: Tax Cuts Offer Most For Very Rich reported what most of us already knew: "Families earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply than any group in the country as a result of President Bush's tax cuts." Op-Ed columnist Bob Herbert noted that in 2006, "the top five Wall Street firms (Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley) were expected to award an estimated $36 billion to $44 billion worth of bonuses to their 173,000 employees." Herbert reported these bonuses - for one year - overwhelmingly exceeded the pay increases received by America's 93 million production and nonsupervisory workers for the last six years. The rich have benefited from the policies and ethics of the Bush Administration; everyone else has gotten the shaft.

Samuel Coleridge's Ancient Mariner famously lamented: "Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink." America's workers are in a comparable situation: all around them are indications of prosperity, yet it's not available to them. For twenty-five years, conservatives promised that a market stimulated by Federal tax-cuts would take care of America's problems: "A rising tide would lift all boats." Yet, the conservative tide lifted only the yachts of the rich.