The Hollywood Liberal

When the class war goes local

SF Gate
Excerpt
Our story begins in the Montana legislature, though it could be anywhere, as this lawmaking body is a microcosm of America’s ideological divides. Democrats pushed to boost education spending and give each resident homeowner a $400 property tax rebate. To fund the plan, they proposed closing tax loopholes and strengthening tax enforcement in a state where roughly half of all Fortune 500 companies doing business get away with paying less than $500 a year in taxes.

But such a move offends conservative politicians and the corporate lobbyists who crowd the hallways of state capitols like the one in Helena — and these types don’t take lightly to being offended

The GOP-controlled Montana House pressed a tax cut for corporations financed by spending cuts, including one eliminating all public-health programs. When last week it came time to negotiate a compromise, Republican class warriors dug in further, offering amendments to kill Democrats’ proposal to beef up corporate tax enforcement.

The result? The legislature ended without a budget, and Montana is now on the brink of its own version of the 1996 Gingrich-Clinton government shutdown. It is a troubling situation for middle-class Montanans, but for anti-government Republican politicians and lobbyists, it is a big victory in their war on the middle class.

Days later, Montana’s U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, a Democrat, joined Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in headlining an economic-development summit in Butte, a devastated city that is one of America’s all-too-common casualties in this economic war. Once the bustling capital of the copper industry, Butte today is known for its salt-of-the-earth inhabitants and for its canyon-like Superfund site known as the Berkeley Pit — a defunct open-pit mine that the Anaconda Company abandoned with a pool of deadly chemicals at the bottom.

The captains of global finance attending this summit no doubt saw Butte’s boarded-up brick buildings and rusting mine shaft skeletons from the windows of their private jets that crowded the town’s airport. Yet, they delivered speeches as if they were attending an executive conference at a Caribbean resort.

HL’s Take
They won’t be happy until there is no middle class left. There will just be the ultra rich, like The Bush family, and about 5 percent of the population, the rest of us will be there virtual slaves. Working for much less money, with no health insurance, no worker safety protection, and no benefits whatsoever. Corporatization has already started the ball rolling on this trend. Are you better off then you were 6 years ago? I know I’m not. Personally I’m making less money then I was 7 years ago, and I was out of full time work for almost 3 years before I finally broke down and accepted my current job. It’s just going to get worse in the future. It’s going to be up to Democrats to get the middle class back on track, because the republicans (who get a great deal of there votes from the middle class voter that only cares about God, Gays and Guns and more War) are working toward the day when Jim Crow comes back.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 5th, 2007 at 5:48 am and is filed under Main Blog (All Posts). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.