A Selective Audience
According to the White House, George W. Bush flew to
Chicago last week to sell an “economic stimulus plan” to the people of
the “American heartland.” As always with the current administration,
reality is rather different than the official word. Truth is, Bush flew
over most of Chicago to the ritzy Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers in
the city’s affluent North Loop to sell a tax cut for the wealthy to rich
people in the Economic Club of Chicago. His speech was received by what
the Chicago Sun Times called “a crowd of cheering businessmen.”
The Economic Club, whose terse web site pronounces
“MEMBERS ONLY,” is “not,” that site’s content providers explain,
“a club of, or for, economists or economics majors.” It is, rather,
“about leadership …the ‘Who’s Who and Who’s to Be’ of
Chicago’s business and professional life.” It has worked “for over
70 years” to “foster the development of civic-minded executives who
embrace their broader role in helping build a better, more productive
society.” Members “must be sponsored and approved by a committee of
their peers.”
Translation: The Economic Club of Chicago is a
metropolitan civic agency of, for and by the corporate-connected
super-rich and selected public, civic and professional servants loyal to
the corporate plutocracy that owns America’s “democracy.” It works
for social and policy developments that preserve and expand the special
wealth and privilege of leading segments of the business class.
“We’re All In This Together” and “I Don’t
Think It Was Rich Versus Poor.”
Insisting that “we’re all in this together”
(United We Stand), Bush accused those who claim his plan is overly
friendly to the rich of engaging in “class warfare.” He received
support in this regard from Chicago Mayor and Economic Club member Richard
M. Daley. According to Daley, who rode with Bush in the presidential
helicopter from O’Hare to the Loop, Dubya’s speech was a winner. “I
believe he hit a home run,” the Mayor told reporters, “in that he
talked to Middle America. It don’t think it was good versus evil,
‘rich versus poor.’”
But of course, “class warfare” – of the
unmentionable top-down variety – is exactly what “it” is and always
has been about with Bush. Bush’s plan contains some proportionately
small measures for poor and ordinary working people. It increases the
child-tax credit, provides some small assistance to the states and creates
small unemployment accounts to help jobless workers whose unemployment
benefits have run out.
Still, consistent with his hosts’ “members only”
mission, the cornerstone of Bush’s package is the elimination of taxes
on American corporate dividends – a measure that “could cost the
government $300 billion over 10 years" and will "create much
bigger budget deficits for the future," according to the New York
Times. “More than half the benefit of eliminating dividend taxes,” the
Times reported, “would flow to the wealthiest 5 percent of
taxpayers." That may understate the proposal’s regressive impact,
since just 1 percent of investors receives more than 40 percent of
stock-market income and the top 10 percent receives nearly 90 percent.
According to the Urban-Brookings Tax Center, thankfully
created “to clarify and analyze the nation’s tax policy choices”
(http://www.taxpolicycenter.org), the liquidation of dividend taxes
translates into an extra $45,000 for people making more than $1 million
and $6 for people earning less than $10,000.
Bush also called for the acceleration of pre-existing
income tax cuts and the repeal of the estate tax, which affects only a
tiny and super-privileged segment of the population.
Just don’t call it “class warfare” or “rich
versus poor.”
Inverted Gramscianism
Chicago Tribune reporter Bob Kemper, no Marxist class
warrior, provided a serviceable framework for understanding the real
purpose and nature of Bush’s visit to Chicago. He noted that the
Economic Club gave Bush a “high-profile and sympathetic forum” to
“symbolically wrap a controversial plan that directs most of its money
to the wealthy in the conservative, common-sense values of the American
heartland.” This analysis reminded me of 20th Century Italian Marxist
Antonio Gramsci’s notion of ruling-class cultural “hegemony” as the
incorporation of social and political arrangements serving the interests
of the privileged few into the “common-sense” world view of ordinary
folk.
Consistent with its inverted Gramscian project, the
White House has been framing its proposed dividend tax cut as directly
beneficial to the broad stock-owning middle-class. This spin deletes the
fact that a small percentage of the population still owns most of the
nation’s corporate stock, however commonplace it has become for
Americans to own some stock. It is also merits mention that ordinary
middle-class 401(K) accounts are already tax-sheltered until their owners
withdraw their money, which then gets taxed as regular income.
Stimulus As Pretense for Regressive Tax Policy
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman also put the plan
in useful context. The president, he argued, was trying to “use the
pretense of stimulus mainly as an opportunity to get more tax cuts for the
rich” – an evaluation shared by “most economists” according to the
Tribune. Even economic “conservatives” – translation: those who
support the radical upward distribution of wealth and power – doubt the
plan will offer any real systemic stimulus anytime soon. The Tribune
quoted economist Kevin Hassett, of the “conservative” American
Enterprise Institute, who acknowledged that “it’s a tax reform [one
that Hassett supports], rather than an economic stimulus…That’s how to
think about it.”
A tax reform for the super-rich, it is worth noting, on
top of a previous massive Bush tax reform for the super-rich. Just two
years ago Bush asked for and received from Congress a mammoth ongoing
income tax cut that directed 70 percent of its benefits to the top 5
percent of taxpayers in what was already by far the industrialized
world’s most wealth-top-heavy nation. This gift to the privileged few,
too, was sold as essential for economic growth and jobs, but the results
so far have been less than encouraging – 2 million more jobless
Americans and 4 million more without health insurance.
Its’ a tax reform for the rich, also worth noting, in
a time of massively escalating imperial (“defense”) expenditures. The
price tag for the White House’s obsessive, unnecessary Iraq campaign,
which includes a possible 18-month occupation to install “democracy”
(or whatever), runs well into the hundreds of billions.
Right out of the Reagan play book, it’s a deliberate
combination – regressive tax cuts and massive Pentagon extravagance –
guaranteed to further eviscerate the federal budget surplus Bush
inherited, undercutting social programs and leaving an intolerable debt
for generations to come.
Sheer Class (and Race and Gender) Venom
Adding insult to injury, Bush yesterday urged the
Congress to tighten the nation’s “welfare-to-work” requirements.
Recycling old Reagan-Clinton rhetoric about “getting [poor] people to
work” (for someone else at low wages and without union protection,
health care and other benefits) and making them “less dependent on
government [the wealthy are exempted from that stricture],” Bush wants
to increase the (paid) work requirements for the single-mother heads of
highly disadvantaged public cash assistance households from 30 to 40 hours
a week. Current law under the harsh Clinton-Gingrich welfare bill of 1996,
passed in the middle of a booming economy, is already the toughest in the
industrial world. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate (considerably lower
than real unemployment) has risen from less than 4 to more than 6 percent
during the last two years. That rate is much higher in the unskilled labor
market inhabited by most welfare recipients and is higher still in the
neighborhoods housing the highest concentrations of the remaining public
assistance caseload.
It takes no small measure of sheer top-down class (and
related racial and gender) antipathy to call for a tightening of the
“work” requirements on welfare mothers in a time of rising
joblessness. To do this while pushing massive tax cuts that will slash
funds for child-care, job-training and other services needed to move from
welfare to “work” requires a transparent class arrogance that is
beginning to seep through the protective corporate media filters, as with
the more obviously aristocratic Bush I.
City of Neighborhoods
Chicago’s boosters speak of it as “a city of
neighborhoods.” In a spirit of democracy befitting a “benevolent”
empire preparing to export freedom and liberty to the Arab world, then,
the President and the Mayor might have made a neighborhood detour on their
to the Economic Club. They could have visited forgotten neighborhoods like
North Lawndale, Garfield Park, Englewood, Oakland and Grand Boulevard to
view some of the “collateral damage” produced by an elite class and
related race war that has been waged with little publicity for the last
three decades.
In Chicago’s ten poorest neighborhoods, all located
on the predominantly black South and West Sides and collectively
containing 212,000 people, there was a distinct shortage of social and
economic Homeland Security well before 9-11. Forty-five percent of those
people lived in poverty at the time of the 2000 census. Median income was
$17,320 and the youth mortality rate was 76 per 100,000.
In the city’s ten poorest zip codes in 2000, also all
on the South or West Sides, moreover, more than a fifth of the civilian
workforce was unemployed (not counting their large number of incarcerated)
and the child poverty rate was 47 percent.
These numbers come from the peak of the Clinton
economic boom; things are worse in these communities now, thanks to the
recent acceleration of paid work’s long and ongoing flight disappearance
from the inner city.
Things were very different at millennium’s turn in
the ten most affluent Chicago neighborhoods, disproportionately located on
the more Caucasian North Side. In those select communities, just 4.6 of
the people lived in poverty, median income was $60,187 and youth mortality
was 1 per 100,000.
But, of course, many Economic Club members probably do
not reside in Chicago at all. They likely inhabit super-affluent Chicago
suburbs like Lake Forest (median household income of $136, 462), Winnetka
($167,458) and Kenilworth (more than $200,000), where well-kept avenues
are dotted with palatial mansions, stock equity flows freely, and
marvelously entitled children attend the state’s finest and most well
funded schools.
Since they generally own no stock, people in
Chicago’s bottom-end neighborhoods do not lose much sleep over the
“double taxation” of corporate dividends denounced in outraged terms
by the Bush, forgetting that wages are levied at least twice by government
in the form of payroll and sales taxes. Many in the city’s poorest
communities have never been employed long enough to receive unemployment
to become eligible for Bush’s proposed small ($3,000) “jobless
accounts.” Many would be happy if they could just get felony drug
convictions expunged from their records, like the President is said to
have done, so they could be in the running to get a job to lose.
Priorities and Response
What do the Bush administration’s actions, very
different than its language of “togetherness,” say to the residents of
the nation’s poor communities? Essentially, that:
They simply don’t work hard enough and their needs do
not (cash) register when compared to those of strategically placed
businessmen whose “success” the government must “reward” (and
create) with wealth-fare for those who now how to put inherited fortunes
and other people’s money and labor to work for them.
Solving their problems is not a public priority
relative to fantastically expensive overseas projects to serve wealth and
better supervise a global system that drains the lifeblood out of their
communities. World history’s wealthiest nation can’t afford to provide
them with adequate job training, child care, health care, environmental
protection, drug treatment and recreation but can afford $200 billion or
more for attacking and then “reconstructing” (or whatever) Iraq.
Taxpayer money that might be spent to educate their children, keeping them
perhaps out of the nation’s burgeoning and expensive hyper-incarceration
system, is earmarked for darker global purposes.
They are, in short, barely more visible than the people
of Iraq and the neighborhoods of Baghdad, whose real situation and likely
wartime fate is banned by Bush doctrine from the bizarrely obsessive White
House campaign against Saddam – as if the world history’s most
powerful ’s military machine could launch a massive assault on just one
man (see note).*
To identify and denounce these and other stunning
American disparities is to prove yet further one’s undeserving nature,
marking one as an unpatriotic proponent of class warfare – the wrong
kind and the only one that can be named.
Criticisms of Bush policy at home and abroad are useful
only in the context of resistance and the development of meaningful
alternatives. Without the latter, criticism tends to reinforce the
widespread fatalism, apathy, despair, and exhaustion (widespread in the
nation with the industrialized world’s longest working hours) upon which
the ruling class relies heavily. A more fully responsible and appropriate
response goes from understanding to changing the dark historical moment.
Bush and his horrid collection of corporate-plutocratic and
arch-imperialist fundamentalists must be compelled to stand down from
their excessive, inseparably linked pursuits of empire abroad and
inequality at home.
Major demonstrations against the currently planned war
on Iraq and the related domestic assault are being held in the nation’s
capital and at other sites throughout the US this Saturday. Let the battle
begin and remember – if it feels like class warfare and if it talks and
walks like class warfare, well, then, maybe that’s just exactly what it
is.
Paul Street (pstreet@cul-chicago.org ) writes and
lives in Chicago, Illinois.
* A recent issue of the Red Eye, the Chicago
Tribune’s silly effort to compete with “alternative” Chicago weekly
papers like The Reader and New City, presented a picture of Hussein
alongside the question “Nuke Him?” Readers were left to wonder how
America might launch an atomic war directed at one man, even less
plausible than Bush’s claim last October that Iraq is a threat to attack
United States territory with unmanned airplanes fitted to distribute
chemical and biological weapons.
