In our opinion: The coming class war
To a homeless person,
someone with a house may appear to live in a different world. But that homeowner or renter could be just a few paychecks away
from also being homeless. So there may not be as great a difference as it seems.
On the other hand,
there are people who really do live in an entirely different world.
Case in point: Richmond’s
daily newspaper ran this little piece in its Jan. 8 business section about an executive with the Richmond-based Carmax corporation:
“Michael K.
Dolan, an officer, exercised options for 50,000 shares on Dec. 28 at $1.63 per share and sold 300 shares the same day for
$53.98 to $54.50 per share, bringing holdings to 502,576 shares.”
That means that
this Dolan fellow made a few phone calls, told some broker to sell a few shares, and ... presto! He wound up more than $15,000
ahead for the day.
That’s as
much as you’d make working full-time for a full year for $7.50 an hour, a pretty common wage in Richmond.
About the time Mr.
Dolan was making his phone calls, an organization called the Center for Responsible Lending was releasing a report predicting
that “2.2 million American households will lose their homes and as much as $164 billion due to foreclosures in the subprime
mortgage market.”
Commented CRL president
Mike Calhoun, “For families who lose their houses because their loans fail, savings and economic security will be way
out of reach.” [Dec. 19, PRNewswire]
Virginia’s new junior senator, Jim Webb, touched on this issue
in his op-ed piece in the Nov. 15 Wall Street Journal. The title was “Class Struggle: American workers have a chance
to be heard.”
“The most
important --- and unfortunately the least debated --- issue in politics today is our society’s steady drift toward a
class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century.”
Webb went further.
After ticking off a list of some of the more egregious inequalities in society, he laid down this warning: Unless a solution
is found to “sluggish real wages and rising inequality,” he wrote, “this bifurcation of opportunities and
advantages along class lines has the potential to bring a period of political unrest.”
Webb caught so much
flack for that piece that you might have thought he was Fidel declaring himself a socialist after overthrowing the Batista
regime. How come Webb didn’t talk about this stuff during the election campaign, his critics asked. We thought he was
just against the war!
To be sure, Webb
is no radical. Remember, he’s the guy Ronald Reagan tapped to be an assistant Secretary of Defense.
But Webb is a sharp
guy and one who keeps his ear to the ground. He’s got a soldier-son in Iraq.
While campaigning for the Senate he dropped by the Goodyear strike picket line in Danville.
He’s evidently caught the whiff of political gunpowder wafting over the class barricades.
Of course, the reason
Webb shared his warnings with the Wall Street Journal is that he’s trying to warn the ruling class, not rally the working
class. He’s turning out to be the kind of reformer who, like presidents Teddy and then Franklin Delano Roosevelt, worked
hard to convince the rich and powerful to give up a little wealth and power in order better to hang onto the rest --- and,
more importantly, hang onto the system that makes that unequal wealth possible.
But it may not be
so easy this time. Neither Teddy nor F.D.R. had to contend with a long, unpopular and losing war. Neither had to calm a population
that is beginning to suspect that global warming could be capable of producing much more than balmy days in January.
Of course, it’s
not just growing class inequalities and outrage over ecological disaster that should frighten the rich and privileged. A week
before Christmas, thousands of African-Americans marched through one of New York
City’s tonier shopping districts to express their outrage over yet another more-than-suspicious police shooting --- this time involving 50 shots and an unarmed man on his wedding
day.
For this issue of
the Defender we decided to devote three pages to an expose of the Myth of Robert E. Lee.
Why? Because someone
else is also thinking about the coming class war. Very Big People are working hard to make sure that white working-class families
about to lose their homes don’t start thinking about joining together with Black working-class families facing the same
thing.
Working-class unity
could bring fundamental changes to a fundamentally unequal system.
And you see, sometimes
the difference between being homeless and not is just a matter of a few paychecks.
This
editorial was reprinted from the January/February 2007 issue of The Richmond Defender.
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