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'The New Aristocracy'

I am scanning a list of the 154 federal programs that President Bush would either zero out or slash in his fiscal-2006 budget, which Congress is now considering. It represents a triumph for the handful who—with Bush conservatism’s chief cheerleader and theoretician, Grover Norquist—would “drown” the federal government “in the bathtub.” In fact, it is an American tragedy in the making: a blot on our collective soul.

The wreckage is breathtaking. It includes termination of a program that tests bio-engineered food safety. Also proposed for axing are conservation programs for American forests and energy, flood prevention, funds for studies in advanced technologies, vital public telecommunications facilities (such as Internet access for schools and libraries), drug-free school programs, workers’ job retraining, vocational rehabilitation, enhanced teaching quality, adult education, community service, child emergency medical services, disease control and prevention, land and water conservation, rural fire-fighting facilities, hiring of police, protection of national parks, education of migrant farm workers, the miraculous Hubble space telescope, high-speed rail (advanced transportation long enjoyed in Europe and Japan), and vocational assistance for veterans.

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In 2004, the 20 percent of households with the lowest incomes received an average tax cut of $250; the middle 20 percent received an average tax cut of $1,090; and the top 20 percent were blessed with tax reductions averaging $78,460. A third of the tax breaks—which Bush wants to make permanent—goes to the top 1 percent of households, those with an average annual income of $1.2 million.

In an article highly critical of Bush economic policy, Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., who bears a vaunted “old-money” family name, writes, “To him who hath more, more will be given.”

Few of the “hath littles” are aware of what’s being done to them. The middle and blue-collar classes are victims of declining wages, ever-higher health-care costs, and other price hikes—led by energy costs, the highest in history, and climbing. Behind the smokescreen of a glorious “patriotic war,” fear of terrorism, and pumped-up religious fervor lies a home-front war against the middle and blue-collar classes: a conservative counter-revolution, which aims at a colossal redistribution of wealth upward, to the New Aristocracy—supported by a self-serving rewriting of the law based not on legal principle but on “free-market” theory.

The intended result is the creation of a “peasant” class, driven to the bottom by the need to compete against cheap labor pools, such as India’s and China’s, working for the bargain-basement wages that are all the big-business scrooges will dole out.

With corporations unwilling to share their productivity gains with workers, as in the old days, and the American union movement in tatters, America’s struggling wage earners confront a sad irony: a nation originally dedicated to dissolving ancient European class distinctions is now being driven backward into another feudal age.

America should be undergoing a profound crisis of conscience. Instead, this is a time of great silence.