Ellen Schultz and Class Warfare

Double click on the Green chart to enlarge.

Do not double click on Ellen Schultz( She looks good enough already.)






Every time Democrats have raised the idea of taxing millionaires. Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and all the Republicans raise the cry "Class Warfare!"

Of course, the Democratic response has been, the only class warfare has been by the rich on the poor, trying to kill Social Security and Medicare and every program Republicans say we cannot afford and the poor do not deserve any way.

But now we have an unlikely knight in shining armor, a woman who is clearly outraged, but not raising her voice, just telling us the facts, just the facts ma'am.

She is a Wall Street Journal reporter, and she's written Retirement Heist, in which she documents just exactly how the rich have pilloried the poor. There has been, she says, a massive transfer of wealth over the past two decades from the great mass of retirees to a small number of executives, who have enriched themselves, all apparently quite legally by helping themselves to the accounts which had been set up to pay retirees pensions.

The rich simply helped themselves to the pensions of the less rich, and left the average workers to fend for themselves, stripped them of the pensions they though they had worked for all those years.

Schultz says, "The plans were in fact significantly overfunded. They had more than enough to pay every dime for every person employed and already retired." But those funds were looted by executives for their own golden parachutes or their own retirement funds at blue chip companies like General Electric.

The result is the re distribution of wealth evident in the green pie chart. Republicans have been chiding Obama for wanting to have the government redistribute the wealth, and now we can see why they were so irate about the prospect of social engineering. They have been doing some secret social engineering of their own, and they have been laughing at the poor suckers who put in years at all those wonderful companies to fund the retirement and grand life styles of the rich.

Think the 99% would be interested in this story? Isn't that what those incoherent crowds have been shouting about? The underlying complaint is that they believe the rich have gotten their gains as ill gotten. "Behind every great fortune, there is a crime," sort of thing.

Or as someone holding a sign on Wall Street said, "I'll believe corporations are people when they start executing them in Texas."