Kucinich: 'Class War Is Over, Working People Lost'

From Raw Story via AlterNet:

"The class warfare is over -- we lost," Kucinich said before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. "I want to make that announcement today. Working people lost. The middle class lost."

The harrowing comments from Kucinich, who is Chairman of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee, come amidst a national unemployment rate of 10 percent, one year and several months after the economic collapse of 2008 has marred the livelihoods of many.

"Don't tell me about class warfare," he continued. "Come to my neighborhoods in Cleveland. I will show you class warfare. I’ll show you hollowed out areas. I’ll show you businesses that went down because they don’t have access to capital. And on Wall Street it is fat city. Don’t tell me about class warfare."

More here.

A favorite right-wing rhetorical tactic over the last decade or so is to shut up Democrats and liberals by dismissing their comments with a simple sentence: "well, that's class warfare." The understanding here is that America is a classless society, so waging "class warfare" is un-American by it's very nature. It is disturbing that the ploy usually works; liberals who don't know any better shut the fuck up when conservatives play the "class warfare" card.

Of course, the reality is that if anyone is waging class warfare in the United States, it is almost always the fabulously wealthy attacking the poor, workers, and the middle class. Sure, there have been a few points in American history, such as the New Deal era, or the Civil Rights era, when regular ordinary people have managed to make some gains at the expense of the fabulously wealthy, but most of the time, it's the rich fucking over everybody else.

That is, we're always engaged in "class warfare," and the most strident and effective warriors come from the upper class, who use their wealth as a weapon to bust heads, all the while denying what they're doing. Yeah, Kucinich is right. We've lost the class war. Really, the only difference I have with the Congressman from Ohio on this is that this most recent loss is nothing new. It's been happening pretty much since the drafting of the Constitution.

Government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy shall not perish from the Earth. It's the American way.

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