Engaging in "class warfare": Let's target the real enemy in the 2012 presidential election...

Dissapointingly, Newt Gingrich's attacks upon Mitt Romney's leadership at Bain Capital smack of "class warfare," similar to but of a different stripe than the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

Attacking the 1%---the millionaires and billionaires---is easy, if only because they provide a very rich target (pardon the pun).  It's easy to exploit this target by asserting "Us vs. Them" and "Have's vs. Have Not's" arguments.  Yet, here's the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives portraying the Us's and Have's as victims of such things as preditory capitalist vultures.

However, in an article published in The American, Steve Conover asks: "Are the 1%---the predatory capitalists---the correct enemy?"

Conover is no flower child but a vociferous proponent of engaging in class warfare.  But, Conover believes the battle lines should not be drawn with respect to income but whether an individual's wealth is earned.  Rather than wage war on the rich, Conover asserts, a "virtuous" class war would be waged on society's predators, pirates, and parasites.

Those Conover would target in this battle include:

• Well-positioned rentiers leveraging their strategic position at a bottleneck in the financial system.
• Wall Street firms employing high-speed data feeds into computers programmed to beat less-sophisticated market participants by using a trading technique known as "quote-stuffing."
• Public-sector union bosses who are powerful enough to swing elections toward the candidates who will sit on the other side of the negotiating table, thereby bending the public trust to their special advantage.
• Politically well-connected businesses that are able to extract government subsidies for their special interest and that are able to get their political friends to pass favorable legislation against competitive threats.

This would be a wonderful battle to be waged in the 2012 presidential election campaign, as the focus would be upon what Conover calls the "true heroes" of the nation's economy: the producers and earners.

The Motley Monk concurs.

Class warfare should defend and reward these individuals.  In contrast, the battle would target the members of the class which lives off of those who produce and earn.  Members of both classes exist at every income level.


Let the discussion begin...


To read Steve Conover's article in The American, click on the following link:
http://www.american.com/archive/2011/december/the-class-warfare-we-need