Refusing to spend capital on production in America, in order to decrease the leverage of American labor, is class warfare (and a threat to the national security of the United States.)
Spending billions of dollars lobbying for the deregulation of industries, resulting in monopoly supply and pricing, bankruptcy, the destabilization of the financial system and environmental destruction, is class warfare — it serves only those already affluent enough to further benefit from the short-term profit streams thus produced.
Looting American business to produce shareholder returns, rather than having them be an effect of long-term production that serves the needs of the people and the nation, is class warfare (and a threat to the competitiveness and future economic security of the United States).
The net result, an imbalance of wealth equivalent to that the beginning of the Great Depression, is class warfare.
For fifty years starting with the New Deal we haltingly and painfully, but successfully, increased the number of people who had tangible access to the promise of America: the right, made manifest, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The attempt to roll back that advance in the human condition is class warfare.
Our neoconservative friends are trying to float a new ethos that we should “celebrate affluence.” How about we celebrate the public and national affluence instead? The two choices are not equivalent.
Johannes Sayre, Kingston
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