Accusations of class warfare have been flying. Who is waging it against whom?



Image from Flickr via Alan Cleaver

By David Barsamian with Richard Wolff
By arrangement with Alternative Radio.

People dread taxes. The tax code is a labyrinth few citizens dare to enter save for the rich and powerful who hire lawyers and accountants to figure out ways to game the system. One corporation paid $26,000 a year to maintain a post office box in Bermuda as its legal headquarters. That little trick saved them $40 million in corporate taxes. Not bad. Taxes on the wealthy used to be high. During the Eisenhower years in the 1950′s, a fairly conservative period which saw tremendous economic growth, the tax rate for the haves was 91 percent. Today it’s a third of that, and few actually pay that much. In true Orwellian fashion, if you raise these issues you are accused of class warfare. There is class warfare all right. It’s been successfully waged by the affluent 1 percent against everybody else.

Richard Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and currently a visiting professor at the New School in New York. He is the author of numerous books on economics including Capitalism Hits the Fan. 

David Barsamian is the award-winning founder and director of Alternative Radio, the independent weekly audio series based in Boulder, Colorado. He is the author of numerous books with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Eqbal Ahmad, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy and Edward Said. His latest books are Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism with Richard Wolff, How the World Works with Noam Chomsky and Targeting Iran. He is winner of the Media Education Award, the ACLU’s Upton Sinclair Award for independent journalism, and the Cultural Freedom Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. The Institute for Alternative Journalism named him one of its Top Ten Media Heroes.