April 14, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

MCCAIN=ELITISM

John McCain and the right-wingers of the Republican party are suddenly in high dudgeon about elitism. Barack Obama said truthfully that working class people in Pennsylvania (and elsewhere) are "bitter" about their declining standard of living. They have voted against their own economic interests by supporting Republicans, who throw up a smokescreen over peripheral issues like guns, abortion, school prayer, gay rights, and illegal immigration. McCain, along with his wife, is reportedly worth $100 million. He has consistently supported policies that enrich the already wealthy (the elite) at the expense of working class Americans everywhere. This commentary by Robert Creamer is at www.huffingtonpost.com:

Damn right they're bitter; they have good reasons to be. And most of those reasons are the economic and trade policies that have -- and continue to be -- championed by George Bush and John McCain.

The McCain campaign is managed by a cadre of Washington-insider special interest lobbyists. He and his current wife are estimated to be worth about $100 million. He reportedly owns eight houses. His let-them-eat-cake economic policies are based on George Bush's failed radical conservative "you're on your own buddy" philosophy. One after another he supported trade agreements that protect the rights of corporations, but ignore the rights of labor, and have devastated one Pennsylvania community after another. He gets most of his campaign cash from the wealthiest corporate interests around. And he has the gall to call Barack Obama an "elitist"?

This is the same Barack Obama who spent years of his life organizing out-of-work steelworkers on the south side of Chicago -- people just like those who live in Allentown or Erie or Pittsburgh or the Monongehela Valley in western Pennsylvania. He stood shoulder to shoulder with them, sat at their kitchen tables, spent hours in their church basements.

EVERY RIGHT TO BE ANGRY

We of the working class have every right to be angry at the government that has consistently betrayed us economically. We should not let ourselves be distracted by the old canard about "class warfare." There has been class warfare all right; the wealthy and corporate elites have waged class warfare on working people for decades. This commentary by Isaiah J. Poole is at ourfuture.org:

Honest discussion about the roots of working-class angst and how to address it has gotten seriously burned in the firestorm of controversy fanned around comments by Sen. Barack Obama that working-class people are "bitter" about the economy and government.

However poorly phrased his original comments were, they were based on a fundamental truth: that conservatism, having failed for more than three decades in its promise to bring broad prosperity to all Americans, has exploited the issues of God, guns and gays—and the lie that government is their enemy—to keep their con going.

For awhile it worked, as millions of voters were convinced to vote against their interests by conservatives armed with polarizing rhetoric. But there is no disputing the anger as these same working-class voters are finding that they've been duped.

The percentage of Americans polled by Gallup who say that they are worse off than they were five years ago —31 percent—is the highest recorded by the polling firm since it started asking the question in the mid-1960s. And that belief is based in reality: Median household income in 2006, $48,201, was lower in inflation-adjusted dollars than it was in 1999, the Census Bureau reports . The latest Democracy Corps memo includes a poll finding that 74 percent of Americans believe the economy is seriously off track.

That same memo also suggests that voters have caught on that conservatives who claimed they were taking government "off the backs" of the working class have put in into the pocket of corporations. "The focus of people’s anger are the corporate special interests that dominate government, producing a demand that politicians make it a priority to take back government for middle class Americans," the memo says.