The GOP’s 'Hunger Games' Vision of America

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/22-1


Jennifer Lawrence in "The Hunger Games" (Photo: Lionsgate/Murray Close)

American conservatives love to attack anyone who raises the issue of worsening economic inequality for waging “class war.” Their compulsion to keep repeating that phrase is revealing in itself; it’s like the serial killer in a movie who can’t help returning to the scene of the crime. Because the only class war being waged in 21st-century America is the relentless, all-fronts struggle conducted by the rich against the poor.

Within the last week, we have learned that poverty remains at near-record levels in our supposedly affluent nation. Even amid a so-called economic recovery, nearly 22 percent of the nation’s children live in poverty, and the overall number of poor people reached an all-time high, at 46.5 million. Income inequality, meanwhile, is roughly twice as bad as it was in the 1970s, reaching a level never seen before in this country or any other industrialized nation. The top 1 percent of Americans now bring home almost 20 percent of the country’s annual income, and have seen their tax bills decline by almost half. Britain, which has pursued similar tax-cutting policies over the last 30-odd years, finds itself a distant second in inequality, with its top 1 percent of earners commanding about 10 percent of total income. So while we may be behind the Brits in public health, life expectancy and almost every other quality-of-life indicator, we still totally kick their asses when it comes to disgusting rich people.

I suppose the “war on the poor” has become a hackneyed headline, but I can’t think of a better descriptive term. It’s certainly not a new phrase, although it was recently resuscitated by MSNBC; in left-wing discourse, it goes back at least as far as Nancy Folbre and Randy Albelda’s economic manifesto of that title, published in 1996. This extended class war has been an extraordinary success, and through the long lens of history it looks less like a series of disconnected events than a coordinated campaign to drive the bottom one-fifth – or one-third, or one-half – of the population into lives of endless drudgery and political apathy, while maximizing corporate profits and concentrating both wealth and power in a tiny oligarchy at the top of the pyramid.

We could use some of the old-school class warfare in the United States, that’s for damn sure. There are occasional glimmers of it, like the Occupy movement, the attempts to organize workers in fast-food restaurants and big-box stores and even, in an ass-backwards kind of way, the Tea Party. But that’s a long road, and I’m not holding my breath. The immense material victories of the last three decades, in which the top income-tax rates have been slashed and the richest people have grown immensely richer, were made possible in the first place by an ideological victory whose consequences are even more far-reaching.

[marmar]

1. K&R

[quinnox]

2. Todays republicans represent the nobles and elites who used to spectate in the coliseum

as poor folk were thrown into the arena to be torn apart, this was good entertainment for the elites, as they gorged themselves on food and drink while watching the spectacle.

[FirstLight]

3. 1984, brave new world, Panem...

It has been very frightening in many ways to see how much our current trends and situation reflects that of fictional dystopia...

I keep wondering if we are going to end up going there completely or if by some strange fluke we will stop the train before it goes completely off the cliff.

meanwhile, I struggle for my own survival, unable to muster the resources or energy or time to fight back. It's exactly what they want.

don't know the answer to this one...