Canadian Class Warfare

 

Michael Valpy -- whose new address seems to be the Toronto Star -- writes that Canadians are becoming markedly intolerant of one another -- and Stephen Harper is reaping the political benefits:

What we have are profound, systemic demographic divisions of age and education that aren’t going to go away for years, if ever — divisions which Harper, like Shakespeare’s Brutus, has recognized as a tide in the affairs of men that, taken at the flood, can lead to victory.

He’s deftly caught the baby-boom on the boomerang — the young and rebellious of the 1960s and ’70s who grew into the old and cantankerously conservative of today.

He’s made hay out of the discontent of the non-university-educated who have been persuaded that the country’s so-called elites have made a hash of things. 

As in the United States, Canadians have stopped listening to those with whom they disagree. The consequence of that deafness has led a large number of Canadians to conclude that the ballot box offers no solutions:

What has happened, first, is that the overwhelming majority of Canadians under age 45 have stopped voting — not out of apathy as far as anyone can tell, but because they simply don’t see their political agendas mirrored in the agendas of Parliament and the provincial and territorial legislatures. How democratic is a country where most citizens below the median age don’t vote? Canada has become a country governed by a gerontocratic minority.

And, like their Republican brethren, the Harperites have fueled the resentment of Canadians who did not attend university:

Second, in a society where the well-educated are seen as possessing an unequal hold on power and an unequal share of the country’s socio-economic fruits, Harper and his Conservatives have been successful at presenting themselves as the voice of Canadians who incongruously have the short end of the inequality stick that government policies have allowed to grow.

 It all adds up to a formula for class warfare -- a war which Stephen Harper plans to win.

The Rich Have Declared That The Poor Are The Enemy

When President Obama proposed higher taxes on the very wealthy this week, Republicans were apoplectic. Once again, they screamed, "Class Warfare."  A look at the numbers exposes that lie. Paul Krugman writes in this morning's New York Times that:

Detailed estimates from the Congressional Budget Office — which only go up to 2005, but the basic picture surely hasn’t changed — show that between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. That’s growth, but it’s slow, especially compared with the 100 percent rise in median income over a generation after World War II.

Meanwhile, over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. No, that isn’t a misprint. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million.

The Republicans have been very successful at selling the myth that the rich create good, high paying jobs. The truth is that those jobs were created by unions who took on the captains of industry.  During the last thirty years, the captains of industry have declared war on the unions and won.

Meanwhile, everyone else has been paying for the roads to transport their goods and services, the police to protect their places of business, and the teachers to educate their children. As Elizabeth Warren, who is running for the Senate in Massachusetts, said this week: "There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody!"

Republicans would like you to believe that the very wealthy owe their fellow citizens nothing. And they are prepared to go to war to make it so.

Good Old Fashioned Class Warfare

While many members of the chattering class have heralded Stephen Harper's election as the beginning of a bright and beautiful future, Linda McQuaig has always seen it for what it is: a concerted and vengeful attempt to turn back the clock.

In today's Toronto Star, she writes that, by waging a successful bait and switch campaign, conservatives have been able to obscure a good old fashioned class war:

The class war has been relentlessly proceeding. While incomes at the top have steadily climbed, incomes of ordinary Canadians have steadily eroded. The real median Canadian family income hasn’t risen since the late 1970s — even though today’s typical family now has two earners, compared to just one earner 30 years ago. In other words, Canadian families are working about twice as hard to keep up to where they were a generation ago.

One of the Conservatives' prime targets has been unions.They have become what welfare recipients were for the Harris government -- straw men who serve to focus public anger:

With unions weakened in the private sector, conservatives are turning their sights on the last bastion of union power — the public sector, where unionization rates remain a healthy 71 per cent (compared with just 16 per cent in the private sector).

Conservative commentators like to portray public sector workers, struggling to protect their hard-won gains, as a pampered elite. (Meanwhile, the royals, among the most pampered people on the planet, are portrayed as down-to-earth whenever they flash a smile.)

This is an old story. It rests on the axiom that the elect -- religious or social -- are the acknowledged inheritors of the kingdom. And  the poor -- who will always be with us -- have to get with the program.