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Overruling the Class Warfare Objection
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BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
by Steven C. Day
Everyone knows that lawyers object to questions. Some people may not have noticed, however, that politicians do the same thing. Take the way George W. Bush responded a few months ago when a reporter asked him to comment on charges that his latest tax cutting scheme will disproportionately benefit the wealthy. "I'm concerned about all people," he replied. "I understand the politics of economic stimulus, that some would like to turn this into class warfare. That's not how I think. I think about the overall economy and how best to help those folks that are looking for work."
Whatever else may be said against Bush's comments (and there's a lot), one thing he can't be accused of is answering the question. No, he interposed an objection. He asserted, in the spirit of Perry Mason, that the question was "incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial." Why so? Because, according to Bush & Co., to even explore the issue of how a particular policy initiative may impact upon the vast economic inequality in this country, is the equivalent to pandering to class hatred. It's an old dodge. Screaming class warfare has become the standard "Get Out of Jail Free Card" for conservative politicians trying to avoid answering difficult questions about the huge gap between our society's have-a-lots and its have-very-littles. Not that reporters (or Democratic politicians) raise these questions very often in the first place.
And the objection worked like a charm. The reporter didn't follow-up (at least no follow-up was publicly aired), thereby effectively sustaining the objection, and Bush escaped without having to directly answer what would have been a tough question. Now, to be fair, the reporter in this particular situation probably didn't have much opportunity for immediate follow-up. But reporters almost never follow-up when conservative politicians raise the class warfare bogeyman. As a result, despite the many fine books and articles that have been published on the topic of wealth inequality, little meaningful public debate is taking place over what is arguably the single most important domestic policy issue of our generation.
Think Bush's evasiveness on this topic was an isolated incident? Guess again. He was back at it again in a speech to a small business group in Albuquerque on May 12.
"Oh, You'll hear the talk about how this (tax cut) plan only helps rich people. That's just typical Washington, D.C., political rhetoric, is what that is. That's just empty rhetoric"
Let's remind ourselves of the facts:
In 1976 the top 1 percent of households held 19.9 percent of the nation's private wealth. By 1997 that figure had more than doubled, with the top 1 percent owning more than 40 percent.
Between 1977 and 1999 the after tax income, adjusted for inflation, of the top 1 percent of earners increased a whooping 115 percent. During the same time, the wages of ordinary workers actually lost ground against inflation.
In 1980 the average CEO of a major corporation made 42 times more than the average worker. By 2001 the average CEO was making 411 times more.
Economic inequality is now worse in the United States than in any of the supposedly "aristocratic" nations of Western Europe.
Although the bursting of the stock market bubble has reduced the net worth of many wealthy Americans, it is unlikely, as Paul Krugman noted in a New York Times Magazine article, that this has significantly reduced the degree of inequality, since average workers have also suffered substantially during the recession.
In just 25 years, a mere blink of history's eye, the United States has been transformed from a predominately middle class society into what Krugman aptly described, in his New York Times Magazine piece, as "a new Gilded Age." And as Kevin Phillips makes clear in his indispensable book "Wealth and Democracy" (from which most of the statistics quoted above were drawn), this didn't just happen. Instead, this striking inequality has resulted, to a very significant degree, from deliberate political choices made on a variety of public issues including taxation, trade, monetary policy and corporate welfare.
Bush didn't create this problem, of course, but upon taking office he wasted no time in making it his own. When you think about the whole range of Bush's policy proposals, from his attempts to undermine labor unions and his opposition to raising the minimum wage, to his efforts to gut Medicare and relax virtually every form of corporate regulation, it's hard to avoid at least entertaining a disquieting, and some might say disgraceful, thought. Is it possible that Bush is actually trying to increase the economic inequality in our country? Does he secretly crave a plutocracy? Certainly, that will be the natural outcome of his policies.
Can he honestly believe that the issue of economic fairness is irrelevant in deciding whether to adopt new tax policies that are certain to exacerbate existing disparities? Or that the mere mention of concerns regarding economic inequality constitutes class warfare? Of course not. He objects to addressing these topics precisely because they are relevant -- all too relevant -- and all too dangerous to his policy agenda. I can't prove it, of course, but I'm convinced that conservative political leaders in this country, Bush included, live in constant fear that some day the American people are going to wake up, smell the coffee and realize just exactly what's been done to them. Because that will be the day the conservative ascendancy finally begins to implode.
So Bush, and the rest of the steal-from-the-poor-to-give-to the-rich crowd, do the only thing they can do, which is to fight at all costs to avoid having to address the impact of their policies on wealth distribution. And their weapon of choice consists of screaming the words "class warfare" over and over again. (Try running a search at the ultraconservative National Review Online under "class warfare" and watch how many hundreds of hits come back.)
In considering the possibility of an alternative scenario, let me offer a hypothetical situation. Imagine Bill Frist, or any other member of the Republican leadership, appearing on one of the Sunday talk shows, participating in a debate or even answering questions from constituents with the cameras rolling, and having The Question asked:
Question: Senator, as you know, in recent years the rich have done much better financially than the rest of Americans. According to the most recent figures, the richest 1 percent of households now own around 40 percent of the country's private wealth. That figure is double what it was just 25 years ago. A similar disparity exists in the income earned by the two groups. Senator, do you consider this growing economic inequality in America to be a problem? And if so, what should be done to address it?
Answer: Well, I don't like to get involved with the divisiveness of class warfare. I want us to all work together . . . (and so on and so forth).
Question: Senator, if I could follow-up, I really would like to get a clear answer to the question: Do you, or don't you, think that the large financial gap between ordinary Americans and the very wealthy is a problem?
Obviously, he may dodge The Question again, but that's okay. Because if he does, we'll just keep asking it and asking it and asking it. We'll ask it every time he takes questions from the public. We'll ask it in letters and e-mails. We'll bombard the press with requests that they ask him. And the beauty of this scenario is that we can't lose. You have probably heard of the rule of cross-examination that a lawyer should never ask a question without already knowing the answer. Well, there's an exception to this when the lawyer really doesn't care what the answer is. We don't care how our hypothetical senator answers The Question. We win merely by forcing him to address the subject on its merits.
If liberals ever do succeed in starting a wide-ranging public debate on the problem of economic inequality, we'll win hands down. The problem is getting that debate off the ground. As Eric Alterman discusses in "What Liberal Media?" the media in general, and business reporters in particular, usually have little interest in pursuing stories that examine economic issues from the standpoint of average people. And all too frequently, even liberal politicians shun the issue of economic inequality. If this debate is ever going to occur, therefore, it will have to "trickle up" from the grassroots.
The Question is one way to help make this happen. What I am proposing is nothing less than a full throttle campaign to force every member of congress and every other significant American political figure to take a clear stand on three questions (combined into The Question): (1) Does economic inequality exist? (2) Is it a problem? (3) What should we do about it? How they answer is up to them. All that we will demand is that they give a straight answer -– no buzzwords, evasions or objections allowed. And if they refuse, then we'll respond by latching onto them like a junkyard dog chomping into a sirloin steak and we won't let go until they relent.
Freedom may not be what it once was in this country, since Sept. 11, but one thing that we're still largely at liberty to do, is to ask politicians questions – even tough questions. And we're also free to urge individual reporters, those with the guts to push the envelope, to themselves ask some variation of The Question. It's not hard, for example, to imagine Helen Thomas posing such a question to Ari Fleischer (or to Bush himself if he had the guts to call on her) during a news conference, then following up like a bulldog when the question is dodged. At least a few other reporters will likely be willing to ask similar questions to other conservative politicians. And since questions can be contagious within the press corp, others may soon join in. Who knows? Perhaps even those most timid of all creatures, the leadership of the Democratic Party, will eventually get into the act.
And along the way, bit by bit, question by question, we'll force this issue, The Issue, onto the center of the public stage where it belongs.
A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
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