MORE KRUGMAN ON THE WEALTHY ELITE'S
CLASS WAR AGAINST EVERYBODY ELSE

From Democracy Now, a speech on the class war from Princeton economist and New York Times editorialist Paul Krugman:

Now, what I can say for sure, and actually some of my colleagues at Princeton in the politics department work on, have done very interesting work on politics, and what they show is that the polarization of politics, which you can measure, and, I would say, the nastiness, which is very -- you can't exactly measure, but it's very closely correlated, is very much -- it rises and falls with income inequality.

Periods, the Gilded Age, the ‘20s, were periods of grotesque abuse of cultural issues, anything to smear people who might suggest things like, you know, progressive taxation. And times when those kinds of views, when everyone had more or less accepted the existence of the New Deal institutions, were quite calm. So that same Time magazine article in 1953 is saying Republicans and Democrats have a surprising sameness of outlook and political thinking, and that makes a big point about how Eisenhower had made it clear that he was not going to try to roll back the New Deal. Well, that's why we -- that's a consequence of being a relatively equal society. And the ugliness and the viciousness of our political scene right now, I think, are in fact largely a consequence of the gross inequalities that have emerged.

Click here to read, watch, or listen to the rest.

If you've already read his column on the same subject posted below, don't think that this speech isn't worth checking out. Krugman expands on the history of the class war and goes further into its effects today--it's well worth the twenty minutes or so it takes to watch the video. What really got me, however, is this notion about income inequality and political polarization. If his poli-sci buddies at Princeton are able to convincingly demonstrate this, that when the rich become vastly richer political discourse descends into the sewers, then it means that economic justice isn't simply about fairness: when the wealthy are too wealthy, political stability itself is in grave danger. If that's the case, and at the moment I don't see any good reason why it's not, the Republicans are playing with fire. Their coddling of the wealthy and corporate sectors stands to literally destroy America with infighting--the GOP may very well be flirting with mass betrayal of our great nation.

I bet this never occurred to Ann Coulter when she was writing her anti-liberal pulp novel Treason.

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