Article first published as Economic War Declared on the American Middle Class on Technorati.

If you’re a middle or working class American, whether or not you accept it, we’re all in the same boat, and we just had a shot fired across our bow. The co-chairs of President Obama’s deficit reduction commission released their initial proposal late last week and made one thing perfectly clear — they believe our nation’s fiscal problems must be corrected on the backs of working Americans.

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was created by executive order this past February. The commission’s primary mission was to identify “policies to improve the fiscal situation in the medium term and to achieve fiscal sustainability over the long run,” and also to “propose recommendations designed to balance the budget, excluding interest payments on the debt, by 2015.”

It’s difficult to fault either the notion to form the commission or the assigned mission. The group was even structured in a bipartisan manner, requiring that no more than 10 of its 18 members be of a single political party. But if the co-chair proposal is any indication of the content of the final report that’s due for commission vote by December 1, then it’s now evident that class warfare has been waged in America, and the two major political parties have allied against the interests of the majority of citizens.

Fortunately, there may still be hope that this isn’t the case, that the co-chair’s full frontal assault on working Americans will not receive the 14 votes needed to move forward. The proposal, as released, is the work of former Republican Senator, Alan Simpson, and Erskine Bowles, who served as advisor to President Clinton.

Simpson’s politics are certainly no mystery, as evidenced by the abusive e-mail he recently sent to the executive director of the National Older Women’s League where he described Social Security as being “like a milk cow with 310 million tits.” And while Mr. Bowles is purported to be a Democrat, his views put him squarely in the DINO (Democrat in name only) camp. He is an investment banker, formally employed by Morgan Stanley, on whose board he still serves, and the co-creator of his own investment firm.

Whether the severe anti-middle-class slant to the present proposal is upheld by the larger commission or not, there is no escaping the elitist agenda of the co-chairs. Their 10 “Guiding Principles” starts with the solemn acknowledgement that we must “come together on a plan” to “get this crushing debt burden off our back.”  And the second principle is like the first, stating that “A sensible real plan requires shared sacrifice.” But sadly, the Simpson/Bowles idea of who exactly needs to participate in said sharing is limited to middle and working class Americans.

The Simpson/Bowles plan does contain a significant number of spending cuts, with illustrative examples that total over $200 billion in 2015 that are interestingly split between domestic and defense expenditures. And while one might wonder why we can trim only $100 billion from a defense budget that’s over $1 trillion — more than that of all other countries combined — or how adding to unemployment by cutting 440,000 federal jobs is going to help the economy, it’s really the proposal’s tax reform recommendations that expose the co-chair’s corrupt idea of shared sacrifice and total disregard for working Americans.

In order to gain clarity regarding the co-chair’s glaringly regressive economic philosophy, one really need look no further than the “goals” they set forth for tax reform: the first of 7 goals is to “Lower Rates” and at the end, in seventh position is “Reduce the Deficit.” A more upside-down prioritization for a “deficit reduction” commission is hard to imagine, but even worse is the fact the detailed recommendations are heavily skewed toward benefitting the wealthy, with a few bones for the poor and a tab that’s picked up by everyone in the middle.

With working America still struggling in the wake of an economic calamity that stripped away as much as a third of the overall wealth of the middle-class and fed the proceeds to rich Wall Street bankers, Simpson and Bowles actually have the temerity to recommend that the few tax advantages held by the vast middle of American wage earners be ended. This would be bad enough if proposed as the mainstay of deficit reduction, but this is not the case. The dynamic duo would use most of the increased revenue, not to reduce the deficit, but to provide steep cuts to the top marginal and corporate tax rates.

The co-chairs propose to slash taxes for the rich by dropping the top marginal rate from 35% to 23% and the corporate rate from 35% to 26%, the combination of which will ADD tens of billions to the deficit. Their proposal also includes restrictions that will prevent Congress from collecting taxes on businesses, like Exxon which had $42.5 billion in 2009 profits and paid ZERO in U.S. income tax.

But never fear, this pair of elitist scoundrels will pay for their proposed tax breaks by eliminating the home mortgage interest deduction and subjecting healthcare benefits to taxation. They’ll also impose co-pays for veterans who use VA hospitals, raise fees at national parks and start charging admission to the Smithsonian museums, and force college students to make interest payment on loans while still in school. It’s time to bend over middle class, because that upper one 1% now make 23.5% of all U.S. income, and they need a tax break.

The “deficit reduction” label of this proposal is nothing more than a rhetorical smokescreen for the “starve the beast” crowd of conservative ideologues to further their goal of plutocratic rule. The gross concentration of wealth in America already has the top 1% holding more than the bottom 90% — a situation that hasn’t existed since the last time the economy collapsed in such grand fashion — the Great Depression. This proposal will only increase that disparity and hasten the American people’s race to the bottom.

Article first published as A.D.D. America on Technorati.

How short is the memory of the American People? How ephemeral is their focus and attention?

Do you remember where you were when Kennedy was shot? How about when the Iran hostage crisis occurred? The opening of the Berlin Wall? If you’re of voting age, there’s no doubt you remember the events of September 11, 2001.

It’s equally certain that you remember the bank collapse of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed. Americans seem to have vault-safe memory of those events that are etched into our collective consciousness, but somehow when it comes to remembering the facts leading up to those events, that steel vault is all too often turned into a plastic sieve.

The 2010 midterm election will happen tomorrow, and virtually all polls indicate that the American people will return control of at least one chamber of the Congress to the Republican Party. Much of this is anti-incumbent hostility stemming from a bad economy, but that’s certainly not the whole story. The most recent Gallup poll on the question of whether voters believe the country would be better off with Democratic or Republican control of the Congress shows a clear plurality, 45% compared to 23%, backing the Republicans.

Those people who dig beneath the hyperbole and spin, those who actually check facts are likely to shake their heads in bewildered disbelief at the writing now on the wall. They may still be in denial, as so many in Washington still appear to be, or they may have resigned themselves to the expected outcome of the election. But regardless of their reaction, knowledgeable voters must all be stupefied at the amazing capacity of the American people to be manipulated and used by those willing to play on their fears and ignorance.

President Obama is fond of using the “drove the economy into a ditch” metaphor to describe the Republican-created mess that he inherited. He asserts that they “can’t have the keys back, because [they] don’t know how to drive.” The Republicans naturally respond that the President needs to stand on his record and stop trying to blame his predecessor.

Well, there is a problem with President Obama’s metaphor, and there’s also a practical sensibility to the Republican response. The President is patently wrong about the Republicans driving us into a ditch — it was a freaking canyon — it was the economic Mariana Trench. And it makes perfect sense that those responsible for the collapse, the feed-the-rich Republicans would be vehemently opposed to assigning any blame where it was due.

The truth of the matter is that the American public has been ripped off by the nation’s corporate elite and had their return to prosperity held hostage by the corporate lackeys commonly known as the Republican Party. And now, in order to punish the innocent and avoid holding accountable the thieves who helped pillage the wealth of the American middle-class, the electorate is going to put the greed-drunk drivers back behind the wheel.

Hurray for the American way!

If only the American people would recall the events that brought us to this point. If only they remembered that George Bush inherited a $236 billion budget surplus that he turned into the $1.2 trillion deficit he passed to President Obama. If only the sting of the 3 million jobs that were lost in President Bush’s last year in office was still clear in their minds, or if they were still mindful that the economy was hemorrhaging nearly 600 thousand jobs per month when Obama took office.

Would we be in the same situation for election 2010 if American voters would call to mind the fact that 65% of the Bush tax cuts went to the top quintile and 50% if his 2001 cuts went to the top 1%. What if they remembered that the price tag for the cuts to the top 1% in 2008 alone was $79.5 billion? How about if the average American even understood that 37% of the much maligned Stimulus, $288 billion, was in the form of tax cuts that went to 94% of the working families in America?

Would it make any difference if the people were aware that, as bleak as things have been, more private sector jobs have been created in 2010 than under the entire 8-year term of George Bush? How about if they grasped the fact that the Republican policies that wrote the economic book for the past decade and tested the effectiveness of growing the economy and creating jobs by cutting taxes, has been proven to be an abysmal failure? If they knew that the first decade of this century produced ZERO net job growth, while no other decade going back to the 1940s produced less than 20%

Americans should be casting their votes with full awareness that Bush and his Republican colleagues had the worst job creation record since 1945, established the policies that gave America its first decline of median household income since 1967, while simultaneously giving the top 1% it’s highest share of after-tax income since 1979, and concentrating more wealth in the top 1% than in the bottom 90% combined.

But the truth of the matter is that, while Republican policies have nearly destroyed America for all but the very rich, a manipulated electorate has allowed itself to fall prey to the incessant Republican barrage of distorted facts and fear mongering. The American people are suffering from severe Attention Deficit Disorder and have sadly forgotten who was driving when our economy went off the cliff.

President Obama has certainly made some mistakes since he took office. In retrospect, the biggest amongst them was probably to underestimate the gullibility of the American people — perhaps he should have played the Republican game of politics over people — he could have omitted the Stimulus and allowed the Great Recession to take its full toll.

But that’s not what real leaders do. No, they set about the hard work of recovery, and when you’re in an 8 million job hole, that takes some time. It’s too bad the American people can’t stay focused long enough to ensure it happens.

This White House has “vilified industries,” complains the Chamber of Commerce. America is burdened with “an anti-business president,” moans The Weekly Standard.

Would that all presidents were this anti-business: according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, corporate profits hit $1.37 trillion in the first quarter—an all-time high. Businesses are sitting on about $2 trillion in cash reserves. Business spending jumped 20 percent last quarter, and is up by 13 percent against 2009. The Obama administration has dropped taxes for small businesses and big ones alike. Maybe the president could be anti-me for a while. I could use the money.

Ezra Klein, Newsweek

It doesn’t matter how much Obama does for business, or how well business is doing. Republicans have proven that they care nothing about truth, facts or the American people — so as long as conservative voters will buy their lies, they’ll keep spinning Obama as anti-business. This is all a given; the perplexing part is how to get conservative voters to actually look at the facts.

As Ezra Klein stated, “corporate profits hit $1.37 trillion in the first quarter — an all-time high.” Business is doing fine and the GDP continues to rise, but average Americans see no improvement. It’s a jobless recovery, and it’s being sustained by Republican obstruction and subterfuge.

The Republican message is that, although business is sitting on a ton of money, $2 trillion according to Klein — they will not hire until there is more certainty about the future. There’s much truth in this statement, but it falls short of telling the “whole truth,” which includes the fact that it’s the Republicans who are creating the uncertainty, and they’re doing so for their own selfish gains.

They could work with the President toward real solutions, but instead they block anything that can help anyone except the upper 2%.  The vast majority of Republicans have voted against extending unemployment benefits, against providing aid to prevent teacher layoffs, against funding COBRA benefits for the unemployed, against providing stimulus to the economy . . . all in the name of fiscal accountability. Yet those same elected officials support extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich, a move that all economists agree will increase the deficit and do very little to stimulate anything but the further concentration of wealth in America.

Conservative voters would be well served to understand that you can support business without completely sacrificing the wellbeing of The People. Being pro-business does not require solidarity with the Republicans who consistently show their total devotion to profits over people. Republican unity against increasing the liability limits for the disaster in the Gulf, against reforming the Wall Street casino, against disclosure of campaign donations . . . against anything that might reduce corporate profits, is not pro-business — it’s pro-mega-business.

Since the Wall Street thieves and gamblers brought down the economy, there have only been 3 initiatives to gain strong Republican support: bailout the banks, cut taxes for the rich, and fund the Military Industrial Complex. If this is where your priorities are, then by all means vote Republican, but do so knowing that you’re supporting only the biggest businesses and the most wealthy people. The real truth is that both parties are pro-business, but the Republicans stand alone in being anti-American-People — well, really only 98% of the people.