Frank Rich: The Class War Has Begun

[babylonsister]

The Class War Has Begun
And the very classlessness of our society makes the conflict more volatile, not less.

* By Frank Rich
* Published Oct 23, 2011



The Bonus Army veterans stage a mass vigil on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol in 1932.

(Photo: MPI/Getty Images)


During the death throes of Herbert Hoover’s presidency in June 1932, desperate bands of men traveled to Washington and set up camp within view of the Capitol. The first contingent journeyed all the way from Portland, Oregon, but others soon converged from all over—alone, in groups, with families—until their main Hooverville on the Anacostia River’s fetid mudflats swelled to a population as high as 20,000. The men, World War I veterans who could not find jobs, became known as the Bonus Army—for the modest government bonus they were owed for their service. Under a law passed in 1924, they had been awarded roughly $1,000 each, to be collected in 1945 or at death, whichever came first. But they didn’t want to wait any longer for their pre–New Deal entitlement—especially given that Congress had bailed out big business with the creation of a Reconstruction Finance Corporation earlier in its session. Father Charles Coughlin, the populist “Radio Priest” who became a phenomenon for railing against “greedy bankers and financiers,” framed Washington’s double standard this way: “If the government can pay $2 billion to the bankers and the railroads, why cannot it pay the $2 billion to the soldiers?”

The echoes of our own Great Recession do not end there. Both parties were alarmed by this motley assemblage and its political rallies; the Secret Service infiltrated its ranks to root out radicals. But a good Communist was hard to find. The men were mostly middle-class, patriotic Americans. They kept their improvised hovels clean and maintained small gardens. Even so, good behavior by the Bonus Army did not prevent the U.S. Army’s hotheaded chief of staff, General Douglas MacArthur, from summoning an overwhelming force to evict it from Pennsylvania Avenue late that July. After assaulting the veterans and thousands of onlookers with tear gas, ­MacArthur’s troops crossed the bridge and burned down the encampment. The general had acted against Hoover’s wishes, but the president expressed satisfaction afterward that the government had dispatched “a mob”—albeit at the cost of killing two of the demonstrators. The public had another take. When graphic newsreels of the riotous mêlée fanned out to the nation’s movie theaters, audiences booed MacArthur and his troops, not the men down on their luck. Even the mining heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean, the owner of the Hope diamond and wife of the proprietor of the Washington Post, professed solidarity with the “mob” that had occupied the nation’s capital.

The Great Depression was then nearly three years old, with FDR still in the wings and some of the worst deprivation and unrest yet to come. Three years after our own crash, we do not have the benefit of historical omniscience to know where 2011 is on the time line of America’s deepest bout of economic distress since that era. (The White House, you may recall, rolled out “recovery summer” sixteen months ago.) We don’t know if our current president will end up being viewed more like Hoover or FDR. We don’t know whether Occupy Wall Street and its proliferating satellites will spiral into larger and more violent confrontations, disperse in cold weather, prove a footnote to our narrative, or be the seeds of something big.

What’s as intriguing as Occupy Wall Street itself is that once again our Establishment, left, right, and center, did not see the wave coming or understand what it meant as it broke. Maybe it’s just human nature and the power of denial, or maybe it’s a stubborn strain of all-­American optimism, but at each aftershock since the fall of Lehman Brothers, those at the top have preferred not to see what they didn’t want to see. And so for the first three weeks, the protests were alternately ignored, patronized, dismissed, and insulted by politicians and the mainstream news media as a neo-Woodstock for wannabe collegiate rebels without a cause—and not just in Fox-land. CNN’s new prime-time hopeful, Erin Burnett, ridiculed the protesters as bongo-playing know-nothings; a dispatch in The New Republic called them “an unfocused rabble of ragtag discontents.” Those who did express sympathy for Occupy Wall Street tended to pat it on the head before going on to fault it for being leaderless, disorganized, and inchoate in its agenda.

more...

http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/class-war-2011-10/

[leveymg]

1. "Establishment, did not see the wave coming or understand what it meant as it broke." They're not

broke, so they don't understand. The One Percent have never been richer, thanks to give-away tax concessions, record military spending and an American workforce that is forced to work for less and produces more with fewer working.

It's class war, indeed. The 99% are losing, and the Establishment thinks this is normal and wants more of the same.

[Angry Dragon]

2. According to polls this Congress has the worst record

of any Congress - a do nothing Congress - no leadership
They are paid to get things done, they have elected leaders and they drift in the seas of nothing done

and then they have the balls to complain about people massing together to give their anger a voice
perhaps there are too many complaints and injustices to have just a few raise to the surface

[TBF]

3. "has begun" ??? I would say that war has been going on throughout history -

and lately in our little corner of the world the rich are handily winning.

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. Yep.

[dtexdem]

11. It's only a war if both sides are fighting.

And it's our side that has been too far out of contention for too long.

[Hotler]

4. k&r n/t

[happyslug]

6. Not the First March for the Unemployed, Coxey did his in 1894

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coxey%27s_Army



List of other marches on Washington

[bhikkhu]

7. Good article...but "classlessness" in the US is a myth

looking at that vs another modern nation - Sweden, for instance, as wealth distribution:



edited to add link - good reading here as well:

http://www.philstockworld.com/2011/08/22/muammar-monday-forced-wealth-redistribution-cheers-markets/

[tavalon]

8. Well worth the read

I wasn't around for the Great Depression but I think we are seeing a redo.

[starroute]

9. And Father Coughlin was a racist and semi-fascist

Not everybody who rails against the banks is a good guy. Coughlin was the Tea Party equivalent of his day or worse.

[Demeter]

10. Some things are too obvious for even the most bent and biased to ignore

which doesn't yet explain the Congress or White House. They love their bubbles.