The 99% vs.1% thing isn't the right metaphor. How should we talk about the REAL Class Warfare?

Hats off to the Occupy Wall Street movement for getting the issue of growing income and wealth inequality on the national agenda, but I don’t think the 1% thing is a fair charge. I also know that OWS is not committing class warfare when they try to talk about what is a real and festering cancer on the American political and economic system—rapidly growing wealth disparity between 99% of us at the bottom and the 1% at the top. This is no flash in the pan. It’s been going on for 32 years now since Ronald Reagan sold the nation on trickle-down economics.

There is a class war going on, all right, and the 99% who are being accused of class warfare are not the ones doing all the shooting and looting. It isn’t even many among the 1%. It is a small group of billionaires, all members of the top one one-hundredth of 1% of America’s and the world’s wealthiest people, who in league with the CEOs of some of the largest multinational corporations and trade groups that represent them, bribe legislatures to shift policy so as to give them ever more of the wealth of the nations. Even many of our billionaires, particularly those that made their wealth through their own efforts and creativity, are not the looters.

Let’s review some facts that show class warfare has been declared against the 99%. When FDR took office in 1933, it was the depth of the Great Recession brought on by years of unregulated casino capitalism on Wall Street and growing income inequality. The top 1% had garnered for themselves about 40% of the financial wealth of the entire nation just before the 1929 crash. Their share of the wealth dropped to about 25% due to the crash and held pretty steady at that level through recovery from the Great Depression, WWII, and the post-war boom. From 1933 to 1980, we built the world’s first powerful middle class. If you graph income and wealth growth for each economic segment from the working poor to the top 1%, for nearly 5 decades, they all grew in lockstep. Then in 1980 Ronald Reagan won election and ushered in the Conservative Revolution and the trickle-down theory dubbed Voodoo economics.

What that actually did is now clear. Reagan slashed taxes for the wealthiest taxpayers by 70%. All that extra cash in the pockets of the wealthy generated a brief flurry of job growth, but exploded the national debt which we had been steadily retiring since WWII. Reagan holds the distinction of being the only president to tipple the national debt in 8 peacetime years. And the lockstep growth of all economic sectors suddenly came to a screeching halt. In inflation adjusted dollars, the bottom 20% actually lost ground over the next 32 years. The next 20% saw their income remain flat. The third quintile grew a bit, the top 20% gained about 30% over the 32 years, and the top 1% enjoyed nearly 300% growth in income. CEO pay went from 25 times the average worker they supervised to a mind boggling 475 times the worker’s pay.
And the top 1% went from their former 25% of the nations wealth to holding 42% today—more than they held back in 1929 when the economy crashed. Over that same 32 years, the strong middle class we had built declined from 65% of the US population in 1970 to just 44% today, and the middle class losses went not into the 1%, which always remains the 1%, but mostly into the ranks of the working poor and the truly impoverished. If we stay on this track, America is headed for an economy similar to that of Haiti and other banana republics, and the rich oligarchs that sucked it dry will move on to feast elsewhere. They are, after all, multinationals. They own chalets in the world’s most desirable spots and private jets to whisk them there.

None of this happened because the 1% caused it. Most wealthy Americans favor higher taxes on millionaires. Trickle down economics and the deconstruction of the safety net was financed by the cartel listed in this discussion, a tiny handful of billionaires and corporatists multinationals controlling a huge pool of wealth with which to buy think-tank ideas, PR, and lawmakers. They paid to have the playing field tilted so all the money runs to them. I would guess they actually want the growing income and wealth disparity to crash the world’s economy. That just means more wealth and property available to be snatched up at fire sale prices. This time, they won’t make the mistake of 1929, having their own money at risk when they collapse the world’s financial system.

So just slamming the top 1% doesn’t work. Vulture capitalists, extraction capitalists, these phrases may come closer to the mark. Greedy Oligarch Pigs is pretty exact, but too few in the electorate even know what an oligarch is. How can we talk about this so we blow a hole right through the Big Lie claim that anyone complaining about being looted by these Greedy Oligarch Pigs is a class warrior trying to divide an otherwise peaceful and happy America (or whatever country you care to consider, if it’s on this path)?