Significance of Class Warfare

Remember the French Revolution?  That social upheaval was spurred on by the insinuation of a mercantile or commercial class into the Aristocacy, whose longevity to that point in history depended upon its agriculture.  It is no small thing that Napoleon traveled and even conquered neighboring countries in an effort to expand France's commerce and trade, even to the shores of Africa.  The tide was turning from agriculture to commerce, as a dominant force in the country's growth.

President Obama in his latest series of talks to the people has called upon the wealthy and elite class to bear their "fair share" of the financial burden to bring about a strengthened economy, as if just by appealing to its members' sense of justice the economy would improve.  He fails to recognize that in the end justice results from a fight, a conflict with one side only emerging as victor.

The wealthy in the US are privileged because they have fought to emerge as victors.  They got the federal government to greatly reduce their tax rate and maintain favorable capital gains tax advantages.  How?  In today's political arena, a candidate needs lots of money for mass media ads and in general to conduct a smart campaign.  His contributors may include the poor and the middle class, but he must depend on the wealthy and the corporations whose CEOs are drawn from its class to manage.  Simply put, from a marketing standpoint, only the wealthy are in position to elect the candidate.  And once elected the legislator's thanks to his financial benefactors in return is a tax system that favors the high and upper middle classes to whom he has become beholden.

There are TV propaganda networks like FOX is in the US across the world, e.g., Venezula, 24/7 espousing the line formulated and marketed by the wealthy, i.e., in the US, by the Republican Party. Time was in the US that the unions were much stronger and powerful.  Their sources stemmed from the ever present threat their existence could mean in closing down an industial plant's operations by whatever means they deemed appropriate.  Management, representing the upper classes, cajoled them, appeased them; and sometimes brought in security to fight them.  But I believe it was the rise of industrial psychology and the study of psychology in major universities, in companies, the emergence of departments of human resources, that ultimately weakened the propaganda of the unions, which stressed the harm management could inflict upon  working class members.
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Some of these points above were made at this past week's meeting of the current events discussion group of the Osher Lifelong Learning Center, Extension Division, University of Nevada-Reno.  The group was discussing the basics of the US tax system and how some of these have been developed.

The overall point I got from the discussion is that the Republican Tea Party members in the House of Representatives are correct when they say that they are in the House, not to compromise, but to war and fight for what they believe (and what the wealthy of this country, their real backers, encourage them to aver).