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| Joe Lhota said he'd have no problem running them over with a train |
I hope the nation is paying
attention, because ultra-conservative, union-smashing, tax-the-poor,
enrich-the-billionaires individuals like the Koch brothers certainly are.
The story so far
The story so far
In case you’re either a New
Yorker who just got home from a six months vacation on Mars, or an
out-of-towner who understandably pays less than full attention to New York
politics, here’s the story – a story notably worthy of your attention.
Bill DeBlasio, a progressive
Democrat with an interesting background (he has a black wife and two mixed race kids) appears to have won the
Democratic nomination for mayor. (There are complications, but you can mortgage
the farm to put money on the likelihood of his candidacy.)
One of DeBlasio’s campaign
promises is that he’ll try his darndest (the odds of succeeding are daunting)
to raise the marginal tax rate by half a percent on the incomes of city residents who earn over half a
million dollars annually. The money would be used to pay for a desperately
needed pre-school program.
For your average,
run-the-mill New York rich guy (there are 27,000 thousand of them earning
between $500,000 and $1,000,000 a year) the average tax increase would come to
$973 a year – which is less than a pair of imported tan summer loafers or a new
frock for his wife would cost in a neighborhood Madison Avenue boutique on the Upper East Side.
Holy crap! You’d think
DeBlasio was proposing mass extermination of anyone with more than two dollars
in his pocket.
Joe Lhota's head explodes
“Class warfare!” exploded Joe Lhota, the Republican nominee for mayor in his acceptance speech — reviving a
favorite whine of the greedy one-percent.
Only in America could the formidably rich declare
financial war on the poor and middle class, and then complain about "class warfare" when the poor and middle class push back.
The one percent crashed
the financial system, got a bailout from the 99 percent of American taxpayers
who never see much, if any financial security, and now grumble about “class
warfare” when asked to chip in an hour’s pay or less for the benefit of the
people they milk dry.
Not surprising that Joe (“Mr.
Warmth”) Lhota is so kindly, so empathetic, that when — during the primary
campaign, yet! — some stray kittens were found wandering the city’s subway
tracks, Lhota favored crushing them with a train rather than stopping the
subway to save them.
Bloomberg fires up desperate
(but empty) charges of "racism"
Michael Bloomberg took
another tack. He accused DeBlasio of “racism” for showing his multi-racial
family in television campaign spots. As if no political candidate has ever
shown his family in campaign advertising! (I guess it’s okay if they’re all
lily-white, like Mitt Romney’s family.) What did Bloomberg want DeBlasio to do
— put whiteface on his wife and kids? Did he want them to wear mime suits, too?
Most ominous of all, the
multi-billionaire Koch family has contributed more thusfar to Lhota's campaign than they’d pay in a good part of a century if Deblasio’s tax increase should
ever come through.
A popular movement?
And that’s what it’s really
about. New York could be the beginning of a popular voter movement, at long
last — of the average working stiff, the under-employed recent graduate, the
squeezed middle class and the strangled poor — against the one percent.
Billionaires like the Koches
and Bloombergs are afraid it’ll spread and that, given enough time, voters might
restore the financial equilibrium of the 1950s and 1960s, and the rich will
have to pay their fair share again. O, the horror of it all!
Expect to see mountains of
right wing dollars poured in to make that right wing iceberg Lhota look good,
and to cover up what he really stands for.
Here in New York, the
election is really a proxy battle of the super-rich against everybody else.
What happens here may not stay here. And that’s what’s terrifying the
billionaires and the corrupt politicians who live off them.
And now this:
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