Why I hate Elisabeth Warren (and most Democrats while I’m at it) Aug. 2 2014
When I first entered High School I attended the public school in town. My freshman year was unimpressive and I showed a total lack of any aptitude for Spanish. The school administration reviewing my first year results decided to drop me down a level to less challenging classes. My parents went to the school to discuss the situation and were insulted by the principle who assured them of my lack of promise and their snobbery. And so it was that the following year, because they could, I was sent off to one of the better private schools in the state. The school was run by Quakers who had a definite world view and considered education as the means to produce a certain type of citizen. We would meet each morning of the school year for a morning assembly where we would be reminded of the expectation they had for us. Each year started with the “We don’t like to see young men idle” talk, followed soon after with the talk that “We as beneficiaries of wealth and the excellent education our parents could afford had an obligation to use our talents and good fortune to be of service to the less well off; “Noblesse oblige”, “white man’s burden”, only even then these phrases were too PC to express our responsibilities that way.
The teachers at that time had personal experiences of the Great Depression and World War II and so the lessons learned from those experiences were part of what they wanted to pass on. The lesson from the War was that appeasement did not work, better to fight small wars than allow your enemy to gain strength. Vietnam was just heating up and the lessons from that war were in the future. The lesson from the Great Depression went something like this. Franklin Roosevelt was not a traitor to his class, but in fact (following the example of Bismarck in Germany before the First World War) had saved the capitalist rich from the demands of the lower class. By giving a little, Franklin could defuse the socialist’s demands for economic justice. Democrats, we were taught, were clever but Republicans were stupid. The Republicans answer to the poor was that private property rights trumped the needs of the poor. Consequently, those millions impoverished by the depression had no claim on their property. The Democrats had a better approach. Sell the benefit and hide the cost, or in common parlance, “bait and switch”. That is how American society got Social Security and why the tax that funds it is regressive. Accountants all know that the social security tax favors the better off because the poor pay on 100% of their earnings while the rich pay a much smaller percentage because of the cap. It’s not fair, but the rich make the laws and write our history. The poor don’t hire accountants and accountants are not going to go out of their way to explain how their clients benefit. The tax rate on Social Security would have been lower for the working man if there was no cap and the tax was collected from all income. It also would have been lower if the politicians had designated the social security tax for what it was meant to do – fund social security benefits. Instead of putting money away for the retirement costs of the baby boomers, our politicians effectively stole the massive surpluses in the fund, and used that money to hold down income taxes. Social security was a great deal for the rich. They paid an obscenely lower percentage of their income in payroll taxes, their income taxes were reduced because surpluses paid into the general fund by poor and middle class people lowered deficits, and the surpluses helped to pay for our frequent wars and interventions on behalf of foreign investments by the wealthy.
This rather lengthy prologue is intended to provide needed context for my disdain of Senator Warren. I exchanged several emails with Elizabeth Warren’s office in Washington, following the government shutdown in 2013. It starts with a letter from me suggesting certain changes to the federal tax code.
It is a very dated view of our situation. The Green Party twenty years ago saw that the future of a stable society required a transformation, not merely redistribution of some small tax credit. People need to become more self-sufficient at a local level. There is nothing in Elisabeth’s response that indicates she has any awareness of this. So what is my reasoning for rejecting her for any position of power?
The response from her office was disappointing. Clearly she is not an educator. She succumbs to the cheap and easy answer of telling people what she thinks they want to hear. In other words she is a politician. Can we afford to waste more time on leaders who pander to their respective constituencies? Elisabeth has angered her political foes but has no record of even trying to pass meaningful legislation. The power she seeks is personal. She is not a fearless torchbearer, but merely another disappointment. Elisabeth is just one more feckless elected official whose comfort zone is stasis. Her response to me was vapid boilerplate pablum. By now, candidates like Elisabeth Warren need to understand electoral politics is no longer about getting elected, but rather saving our planet. Her response was cobbled with clichés and platitudes demonstrating not a single original or creative thought. Our political system has become a haven for the mundane and mediocre and Elisabeth is a perfect fit. Beware of the sweet songs of the sirens they are not leading you home but to destruction on the rocks.
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