By: Paul S. Marchand
To hear the Republican Congressional leadership -- or the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls -- tell it, America’s “job creators” are either the uber-rich, or the business organizations they control.
In fact, the backbone of American business, and the backbone of the American economy, is to be found in America’s millions of small businesses, like those which came together on Saturday, October 15, for the Perez Road Fall Festival in Cathedral City. (Full disclosure: I happen to be a small business owner whose offices are located on Perez Road.)
Several dozen small business owners had booths at the festival, and, since my line of work didn’t really lend itself to having a booth, I had the opportunity to mix and mingle among festival attendees and with my fellow Perez Road businesses and business owners.
One thing was clearly evident, even if unstated; all of us at the Fall Festival are members of that 99 percent majority of Americans who have not been beneficiaries of the pervasive and ongoing socialization of risk and privatization of reward that has led to an unprecedented upward transfer of wealth over the last decade.
We are the people who have, to all intents and purposes, been bankrolling the cleanup of the vast mass created by America’s astonishingly ill managed and largely unaccountable financial services industry.
Now most of us in small business don’t have a lot of time to be engaged in the kind of activism which has led to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Indeed, some of my fellow small-business owners find the Occupy Wall Street movement objectionable or even frightening. But others, myself included, have a more nuanced reaction, which in some cases includes a sense of shock or surprise that the Occupy Wall Street movement -- or something like it -- should have been so long in coming. Whatever our views of the Occupation of Wall Street, however, most of us agreed that we in the middle class small-business community are tired of having to take a haircut in order to make the uber-rich even richer.
For at a certain point, even the most long-suffering middle and working-class Americans sooner or later get fed up with a politics that, in the words of the 19th-century American commentator Lyman Abbott, “encourage[s] the spoliation of the many for the benefit of the few,” and which “protect[s] the rich and forget[s] the poor,” particularly when they see their nest eggs being used as an ATM to shore up mismanaged institutions that have been deemed “too big to fail,” while they themselves are apparently considered “too small to care about.”
This sense of economic disquiet, coupled with increasing frustration and anger that the economic well-being of the 99 percent has been consciously sacrificed in favor of that of the top one percent was reflected in a number of conversations I had with my fellow Perez Road small-business owners. We spoke of how difficult these economic times were, and often in our conversations that sense of anger and frustration became very clear very quickly, and was shared equally irrespective of partisan affiliation.
I can also tell from some of my conversations that while many, if not most, of those with whom I spoke were themselves either skeptical of the Occupation movement, or agnostic about its chances of success, they were also equally disinclined to pour onto the Occupy Wall Street protesters the kind of scorn and vitriol that have come from the organized spinmeisters of the right-wing; it is a little difficult to buy the spin when many of the faces we see on Internet or broadcast coverage are faces very much like our own, middle and working class people, often middle aged or older, worried about their future and that of young people who are protesting with them.
I can also tell that a number of the people with whom I had spoken -- not only at the Fall Festival, but also elsewhere in recent days -- are also increasingly disinclined to buy into the spin about the so-called 53 percent who are supposedly paying all the taxes in America.
It’s an easy soundbite, but one which conveniently ignores the fact that just about every American alive pays some form of tax, whether sales-tax or property tax or other state and local rate.
The spinmeisters of the right, particularly over at Fox News, would also have us forget that among that so-called 47 percent who ostensibly pay no tax at all are such Fortune 500 companies as General Electric, which paid not one cent in federal income tax last year. Of course, the right-wing spin ignores General Electric while instead scapegoating those who have been too poor to have any taxable income, young children who have not yet entered the workforce, seniors who have left the workforce, and -- even more insultingly -- disabled veterans who have come home from our endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan maimed, mutilated, and altogether unable to subsist for themselves, but who must depend for their very substance and survival upon the willingness of the Republic for which they gave so much to offer some kind of compensation and recognition.
While I certainly do not presume to speak for the entire business community, I do know one thing: the small-business community with which I am in touch in Cathedral City and the Coachella Valley is a part of that 99 percent whose collective net worth has been considered a legitimate subject of spoliation in order to protect and enhance the financial well-being of the richest one percent of Americans, and we in the small-business community are wise to what’s going on and growing increasingly angry at having our till raided, our intelligence insulted, and our posterity put at risk.
As Lyman Abbott noted there is indeed something wrong with legislators who “encourage the spoliation of the many for the benefit of the few, protect the rich and forget the poor.” There is something wrong when presidential hopefuls of either party encourage fiscal policy which, to all intents and purposes, advocates taxing the poor more so that the wealthiest among us can pay less.
While I usually hesitate to quote Scripture, I cannot help but remember those powerful words of the Gospel according to St. Luke, which I first learned as a child in the majestic cadences of the King James Version: “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.” Luke 12:48.
Now certainly there will be those like Glenn Beck who believe that society owes no duty to the poor, the destitute, and the dispossessed, who believe that talk of social justice or having “a preferential option for the poor,” is just a bunch of socialist babble. Yet even were we to ignore our historic sense of obligation, and our historic call to do social justice, there are sound pragmatic reasons why many of us in the small-business community have a preferential option for those civil disobedients who have had the courage to occupy Wall Street.
For the progressive immiseration of the middle and working classes in the United States is, from a pragmatic point of view, the most dangerous development conceivable for our Republic. The prosperity of the United States depends far more on labor than it does on capital, a fact America’s first GOP president, Abraham Lincoln, recognized in his first State of the Union message to Congress when he declared that “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” Sadly, too many in the one percent and too many of their supporters seem to have forgotten Lincoln’s words.
If the American working and middle classes are reduced to penury and pauperism, who will buy the products and services American business produces? An impoverished population, lacking the purchasing power to do much more than a subsist from hand to mouth, may be one whose lack of political and economic power appeals to the uber-rich among us who have sought to concentrate not only wealth, but also political power, in their own hands, but a country with such a population can hope for neither economic strength nor national security.
Thus, if the spoliation of America’s middle and working classes succeeds in destroying the small-business driven capitalist system which has been the engine of our prosperity, the One Percenters will have only themselves to thank when their ill-gotten gains and power prove transitory and hollow, and when their children find themselves driven in armored limousines from gated communities to private schools guarded by private militias in order to learn the Mandarin language of their new Chinese masters.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City California. He is one of the 99 percent, and the views set forth herein are his own, but are probably shared by a whole lot of other 99 percenters. All rights reserved.
To hear the Republican Congressional leadership -- or the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls -- tell it, America’s “job creators” are either the uber-rich, or the business organizations they control.
In fact, the backbone of American business, and the backbone of the American economy, is to be found in America’s millions of small businesses, like those which came together on Saturday, October 15, for the Perez Road Fall Festival in Cathedral City. (Full disclosure: I happen to be a small business owner whose offices are located on Perez Road.)
Several dozen small business owners had booths at the festival, and, since my line of work didn’t really lend itself to having a booth, I had the opportunity to mix and mingle among festival attendees and with my fellow Perez Road businesses and business owners.
One thing was clearly evident, even if unstated; all of us at the Fall Festival are members of that 99 percent majority of Americans who have not been beneficiaries of the pervasive and ongoing socialization of risk and privatization of reward that has led to an unprecedented upward transfer of wealth over the last decade.
We are the people who have, to all intents and purposes, been bankrolling the cleanup of the vast mass created by America’s astonishingly ill managed and largely unaccountable financial services industry.
Now most of us in small business don’t have a lot of time to be engaged in the kind of activism which has led to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Indeed, some of my fellow small-business owners find the Occupy Wall Street movement objectionable or even frightening. But others, myself included, have a more nuanced reaction, which in some cases includes a sense of shock or surprise that the Occupy Wall Street movement -- or something like it -- should have been so long in coming. Whatever our views of the Occupation of Wall Street, however, most of us agreed that we in the middle class small-business community are tired of having to take a haircut in order to make the uber-rich even richer.
For at a certain point, even the most long-suffering middle and working-class Americans sooner or later get fed up with a politics that, in the words of the 19th-century American commentator Lyman Abbott, “encourage[s] the spoliation of the many for the benefit of the few,” and which “protect[s] the rich and forget[s] the poor,” particularly when they see their nest eggs being used as an ATM to shore up mismanaged institutions that have been deemed “too big to fail,” while they themselves are apparently considered “too small to care about.”
This sense of economic disquiet, coupled with increasing frustration and anger that the economic well-being of the 99 percent has been consciously sacrificed in favor of that of the top one percent was reflected in a number of conversations I had with my fellow Perez Road small-business owners. We spoke of how difficult these economic times were, and often in our conversations that sense of anger and frustration became very clear very quickly, and was shared equally irrespective of partisan affiliation.
I can also tell from some of my conversations that while many, if not most, of those with whom I spoke were themselves either skeptical of the Occupation movement, or agnostic about its chances of success, they were also equally disinclined to pour onto the Occupy Wall Street protesters the kind of scorn and vitriol that have come from the organized spinmeisters of the right-wing; it is a little difficult to buy the spin when many of the faces we see on Internet or broadcast coverage are faces very much like our own, middle and working class people, often middle aged or older, worried about their future and that of young people who are protesting with them.
I can also tell that a number of the people with whom I had spoken -- not only at the Fall Festival, but also elsewhere in recent days -- are also increasingly disinclined to buy into the spin about the so-called 53 percent who are supposedly paying all the taxes in America.
It’s an easy soundbite, but one which conveniently ignores the fact that just about every American alive pays some form of tax, whether sales-tax or property tax or other state and local rate.
The spinmeisters of the right, particularly over at Fox News, would also have us forget that among that so-called 47 percent who ostensibly pay no tax at all are such Fortune 500 companies as General Electric, which paid not one cent in federal income tax last year. Of course, the right-wing spin ignores General Electric while instead scapegoating those who have been too poor to have any taxable income, young children who have not yet entered the workforce, seniors who have left the workforce, and -- even more insultingly -- disabled veterans who have come home from our endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan maimed, mutilated, and altogether unable to subsist for themselves, but who must depend for their very substance and survival upon the willingness of the Republic for which they gave so much to offer some kind of compensation and recognition.
While I certainly do not presume to speak for the entire business community, I do know one thing: the small-business community with which I am in touch in Cathedral City and the Coachella Valley is a part of that 99 percent whose collective net worth has been considered a legitimate subject of spoliation in order to protect and enhance the financial well-being of the richest one percent of Americans, and we in the small-business community are wise to what’s going on and growing increasingly angry at having our till raided, our intelligence insulted, and our posterity put at risk.
As Lyman Abbott noted there is indeed something wrong with legislators who “encourage the spoliation of the many for the benefit of the few, protect the rich and forget the poor.” There is something wrong when presidential hopefuls of either party encourage fiscal policy which, to all intents and purposes, advocates taxing the poor more so that the wealthiest among us can pay less.
While I usually hesitate to quote Scripture, I cannot help but remember those powerful words of the Gospel according to St. Luke, which I first learned as a child in the majestic cadences of the King James Version: “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.” Luke 12:48.
Now certainly there will be those like Glenn Beck who believe that society owes no duty to the poor, the destitute, and the dispossessed, who believe that talk of social justice or having “a preferential option for the poor,” is just a bunch of socialist babble. Yet even were we to ignore our historic sense of obligation, and our historic call to do social justice, there are sound pragmatic reasons why many of us in the small-business community have a preferential option for those civil disobedients who have had the courage to occupy Wall Street.
For the progressive immiseration of the middle and working classes in the United States is, from a pragmatic point of view, the most dangerous development conceivable for our Republic. The prosperity of the United States depends far more on labor than it does on capital, a fact America’s first GOP president, Abraham Lincoln, recognized in his first State of the Union message to Congress when he declared that “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” Sadly, too many in the one percent and too many of their supporters seem to have forgotten Lincoln’s words.
If the American working and middle classes are reduced to penury and pauperism, who will buy the products and services American business produces? An impoverished population, lacking the purchasing power to do much more than a subsist from hand to mouth, may be one whose lack of political and economic power appeals to the uber-rich among us who have sought to concentrate not only wealth, but also political power, in their own hands, but a country with such a population can hope for neither economic strength nor national security.
Thus, if the spoliation of America’s middle and working classes succeeds in destroying the small-business driven capitalist system which has been the engine of our prosperity, the One Percenters will have only themselves to thank when their ill-gotten gains and power prove transitory and hollow, and when their children find themselves driven in armored limousines from gated communities to private schools guarded by private militias in order to learn the Mandarin language of their new Chinese masters.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City California. He is one of the 99 percent, and the views set forth herein are his own, but are probably shared by a whole lot of other 99 percenters. All rights reserved.
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