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Class war?
That's what lots of people are calling this move to limit executive compensation at companies that are on the Federal dole.
Oh, please! That's not class war, it's barely a class skirmish.
When it comes to the real class war, the stuff that matters, not just optics about CEO earnings, the rich are thrashing the rest of us, just like they always do.
It's class war when Washington passes a $700 billion TARP bailout for Wall Street with feverish haste, but struggles to pass an $800 to $900 billion stimulus package for everybody else.
Think about that for a second.
Bail out the banks, no problem! But give a helping hand to poor, working class, and middle class people? That we have to debate endlessly. Washington knows how to bail out the rich, but our incredibly popular President is having trouble bailing out the other 99% of the country.
That, my friends, is class war. And it's so institutionalized that we don't even realize it's going on. The establishment in this country is so tilted in favor of the folks at the top, that we scream "socialism" when executives at banks that have taken billions of dollars of bailout cash from the government because they ran their companies into the ground aren't allowed to earn more than $500,000 a year.
As far as I'm concerned, that's not a real victory for the proletariat, or the middle class, as everyone in this country likes to think of themselves. It's totally symbolic.
When you go below the symbolism and look at the substance—sure there are salary caps, because we already gave these banks hundreds of billions of dollars—it's pretty clear which side is winning this war.
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