Classless Warfare

Tea Party conservatives protest?  The voice of Real America that all must obey.  Occupy Wall Street protests?  Violent class warfare that pits "American versus American".

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor took to the stage at the 2011 Voter Values Summit in Washington to do a little fear-mongering about the growing Occupy Wall Street protests.

"If you read the newspapers today, I for one am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country," he said.

Cantor appeared try and connect the protests to the cries of "class warfare" Republicans are lobbing at President Obama's jobs bill and his Buffett Rule.

"Believe it or not, some in this town have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against Americans," Cantor said.

Think the 1% is getting concerned?  Enough to have the House majority leader attack them as a "growing mob".  Which is funny, I thought the Tea Party was in fact proud of saying "We are the mob!"




Now of course when people are actually protesting the folks that really did destroy the country's economy, now being a mob is bad.  Republicans are having a field day by projecting all the criticisms of the Tea Party over the last two years onto OWS, and laughing them off as the unfortunate poor who probably shouldn't even have the right to vote.

As I roll this thing back and I think of American history, there was a time in American history when you had to be a male property owner in order to vote. The reason for that was, because they wanted the people who voted — that set the public policy, that decided on the taxes and the spending — to have some skin in the game.

Now we have data out there that shows that 47 percent of American households don’t pay taxes, 51 percent of American wage-earners don’t have an income tax liability. And it’s pretty clear that there are a lot of people who are not in the workforce at all. In fact, of our unemployment numbers — that run in the 13 or 14 million category — when you go to the Department of Labor Statistics and you look at that data, you can add up those that are simply not in the workforce of different age groups, but of working age, add that number to the number of those who are on unemployment and you come up with a number that was just a few months ago 80 million Americans. Just over a month ago that number went over 100 million Americans that aren’t working.

Now I don’t think they’re paying taxes. But many of them are voting. And when they vote, they vote for more government benefits.

The 1% is now fully playing into the fears of "class warfare" and the GOP is leading the way in continuing to marginalize the vast majority of Americans.