Historical Comment

There's a good column by Paul Krugman in the New York Times today, in which he describes the crybaby fat cats whose incredible selfishness defines so much of the debate about taxes in this country. It reminds me of the situation that existed in the South in the decades before the Civil War, when the large plantation owners used their considerable clout to define slavery in such a way that the majority of poor whites bought into the lie that their destiny was somehow dependent on preserving a system that really only benefited the few who were fortunate to own more than twenty slaves. Keep in mind that less than a third of white southerners owned any slaves at all, and less than one percent owned enough to be considered among the elite planter class. But it was that relative handful of people who exercised their political and media clout to shape the attitudes of a whole region (and arguable the country), to preserve a system that was not only brutal to African-Americans, but also incredibly and cynically hypocritical with respect to such core American values as freedom and democracy. The rich today, who've seen their tax rates shrink regularly going back over thirty years, while those less fortunate mostly get hammered-- if not by taxes per se, then by the loss of services and protections that once gave them a modicum of security in the face of hard times-- now complain that class war is being waged against them (Eric Cantor raised that hoary charge just yesterday), just as the slave-owners once swore out warrants against abolitionists for daring to challenge the former's "right" to own another human being. The worst part of this is that too many of our elected representatives feel obligated to back the wealthy, which was also true among far too many (both North and South) for too long a time in the antebellum period. Back then, when war eventually came, let's recall that it was the southern master class that fired the first shots, both figuratively (in pushing for secession) and literally at Fort Sumter. The tragedy then (as it appears now) was that a lot of poor saps bought into the self-serving rhetoric of the rich, and in the end lost a lot more than those who defined the terms of debate to serve their own selfish interests.