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David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

I know I should be mortified by the lobbyist-organized mobs of angry Brooks Brothers mannequins who are now making headlines by shutting down congressional town hall meetings. I know I should be despondent during this, the Khaki Pants Offensive in the Great American Health Care and Tax War. And yet, I’m euphorically repeating one word over and over again with a big grin on my face.

Finally.

Finally, there’s no pretense. Finally, the Me-First, Forget-Everyone-Else Crowd’s ugliest traits are there for all to behold.

The group’s core gripe is summarized in a letter I received that denounces a proposed surtax on the wealthy and corporations to pay for universal health care:

“Until recently, my family was in the top 3 percent of wage earners,” the affluent businessperson fumed in response to my July column on taxes. “We are in the group that pays close to 60 percent of this nation’s taxes … Think for a second how you would feel if you built a business and contributed more than your share to this country only to be treated like a pariah.”

This sob story about the persecuted rich fuels today’s “Tea Parties” – and I’m sure you’ve heard some version of it in your community.

I’m also fairly certain that when many of you run into the Me-First, Forget-Everyone-Else Crowd, you don’t feel like confronting the faux outrage. But on the off chance you do muster the masochistic impulse to engage, here’s a guide to navigating the conversation:

What They Will Scream: We can’t raise business taxes, because American businesses already pay excessively high taxes!

What You Should Say: Here’s the smallest violin in the world playing for the businesses. The Government Accountability Office reports that most U.S. corporations pay zero federal income tax. Additionally, as even the Bush Treasury Department admitted, America’s effective corporate tax rate is the third lowest in the industrialized world.

What They Will Scream: But the rich still “pay close to 60 percent of this nation’s taxes!”

What You Should Say: Such statistics refer only to the federal income tax. When considering all of “this nation’s taxes” including payroll, state and local levies, the top 5 percent pay just 38.5 percent of the taxes.

What They Will Scream: But 38.5 percent is disproportionately high! See? You’ve proved that the rich “contribute more than their share” of taxes!

What You Should Say: Actually, they are paying almost exactly “their share.” According to the data, the wealthiest 5 percent of America pays 38.5 percent of the total taxes precisely because they make just about that share – a whopping 36.5 percent! – of total national income. Asking these folks to pay slightly more in taxes – and still less than they did during the go-go 1990s – is hardly extreme.

Stripped of facts, your conversation partner will soon turn to unscientific terrain, claiming it is immoral to “steal” and “redistribute” income via taxes. Of course, he will be specifically railing on “stealing” for stuff like health care, which he insists gets “redistributed” only to the undeserving and the “lazy” (a classic codeword for “minorities”). But he will also say it’s OK that government sent trillions of dollars to Wall Streeters.

And that’s when you should stop wasting your breath.

What you’ve discovered is that the Me-First, Forget-Everyone-Else Crowd isn’t interested in fairness, empiricism or morality.

With 22,000 of their fellow countrymen dying annually for lack of health insurance and with Warren Buffett paying a lower effective tax rate than his secretary, the Me-First, Forget-Everyone-Else Crowd is merely using the argot of fairness, empiricism and morality to hide its real motive: selfish greed.

No argument, however rational, is going to cure these narcissists of that grotesque disease.

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David Sirota is the bestselling author of the books “Hostile Takeover” (2006) and “The Uprising” (2008). Find his blog at OpenLeft.com or e-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com<–>

Jane Hamsher

By Jane Hamsher
Founder, FireDogLake.com

If you got your information from Wyatt Andrews on CBS News last night, you would believe that “angry protesters” are cropping up “everywhere Democrats are trying to defend health care reform.”  You would think that “conservative websites” like Freedomworks are organizing these ordinary Americans, based on “real fear over the increased taxes” and “government control” of the health care system.  

Max Pappas from Freedomworks shows up to speak on their behalf.

Freedomworks isn’t some “organic grassroots” outfit.  It’s run by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey –  corporate lobbyist, global warming denier and ladies’ man.   The President and CEO of Freedomworks is Matt Kibbe, who was trained by Lee Atwater.  Kibbe was behind the attempt to get Ralph Nader put on the ballot in Oregon in 2004, prompting a complaint to the FEC of illegal collusion with the GOP.

Steve Forbes is on the FreedomWorks board. As Paul Krugman noted, their money comes from the Koch, Scaife, Bradley, Olin nexus, as well as other reliable funders of right wing infrastructure including Exxon Mobil. 

Freedomworks has a long history of skunk works. In 2004, a woman who identified herself as a “single mother” in Iowa, Sandra Jacques, appeared at a George Bush town hall and gushed about his plan to privatize Social Security. She left out the part about being an employee of Freedomworks, who were lobbying on the issue at the time.

David Koch is also Chairman of the other major outfit heavily involved in

Kratovil hung in effigy

these “organic” uprisings, Americans for Prosperity, whose members lynched Democrat Frank Kratovil in effigy.  Koch is  the 19th richest man in the world.  They recently renamed the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center the David H. Koch Theater.

These aren’t just some organizations that these guys gave money to.  They run them.  

This extreme violent behavior is being organized and funded by those at the highest levels of the conservative infrastructure.  It’s not some sideline, some quirky hobby.  It is the function and purpose of these organizations to threaten and intimidate elected officials in order to subvert the will of the electorate to a corporate agenda. 

As DDay says, “This is not about policy. It’s about incitement to violence.”

The country overwhelmingly does not trust the private insurance industry.  Even internal GOP polls show that 58% of Republicans support “creating a government run health insurance agency that will compete with private insurance companies,” as do 76% of the American public. 

According to the North Carolina Institute of Medicine, there are 52 million Americans currently without health insurance.  We are a country in crisis.  If the government cannot respond by delivering a public plan with a President who campaigned on creating one, a 60 vote Democratic majority in the Senate,  a Speaker of the House who has committed to doing so and majority support in both parties among the public, then we do not live in a representative democracy any more.  The country is ungovernable.

And that is in large part because organizations like CBS and the New York Times do not report the news when it is right in front of them. They pass off these transparent lobbyist funded thuggery as a grassroots effort.  They do not say who is organizing these violent uprisings, or what the objective is of those who are funding them — which has nothing to with the public’s “fear” of “government control” over the health care system.  These media outlets are playing a critical role by telling the country that its people believe something that they don’t.  When David M. Herszenhorn and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times refer to them simply as “loose-knit coalition of conservative voters and advocacy groups,” they are helping to pass off blatant propaganda as news.

It is to “journalism” what David H. Koch is to “grassroots.”

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