The Gilded Millennium

A payroll tax cut for workers and the extension of unemployment benefits.  These are reasonable measures to take in order to strengthen the American worker, the backbone of the American economy.  The President has pushed for these issues well before the debt ceiling debate reached crisis proportions, but has been stonewalled by corporate backed conservative GOP and Fundamentalist Tea Party ideologues.  The new deadlines for millions of unemployed sits at December 31 when current plan ends, a complete disaster if congress does not take action.

Now corporate heads are beginning to demand accountability from their elected officials.  Warren Buffet wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times decrying the nature of patron politics played by conservative GOP and Tea Party Fundamentalists.  Buffett spelled out the situation:

"While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors."

Bufett blasts an unfair tax system in which middle class workers pay 30-40% taxes while he skates by barely paying a 17.4% rate.  Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz urged fellow CEO's to cease political contributions while Washington is bogged down by infighting, preventing the resurgance of American enterprise for all its citizens.  Schultz called for CEO's to do more to create jobs for the American economy. 

As President Obama makes his way across the nation for his town hall tour, make your way out to thank our president in this time of political hostilities.  The president is well aware of what he is fighting for, our beloved nation and the strength of our economy.  He reiterated his stance yesterday in Minnesota and Iowa:

“[There are] two contrasting visions that are going to be presented in the next year-and-a-half,” Obama told about 500 supporters in rural Iowa against the backdrop of a red barn. “I’m on a side that says we live within our means … and invest in jobs. The other side says we are going to make sure those who have benefited the most will pay the least. That’s their vision, [to] dismantle Medicare and turn it into a voucher system."

In the end, it is the middle class and poor who suffer while the rich only accumulate more capital.  Don Peck recently wrote " Can the Middle Class Be Saved? " in the August 2011 issue of Atlantic Monthly.  Mr. Peck cites a new term used by business analysts at Citigroup to describe the American economy and its trickle down motion, Plutonomy.  A hybrid of plutocracy and oligarchy, it is noted when "economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few."  Moreover, Mr. Peck quotes Alan Binder former vice chairman of the the Federal Reserve noting the American economy could loose 22 - 29% of all jobs to outsourcing in the next couple of decades.  Our only hope is the ability of President Obama to fight the the political patronage and nepotism of the conservative GOP and the Tea Party Fundamentalists.  As of now the American electorate has allowed for the creation of a Gilded Millennium in which America is divided into two distinct economic groups: the rich and the rest.