Jon Kyl: the middle class should idolize their betters

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The door cannot hit this embarrassment to Arizona in his ass on the way out soon enough.

Did you hear about this? "President Barack Obama should stop talking about the middle class because it turns people against rich Americans, who should be embraced as the Michael Jordans of the U.S. economy," Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said Monday. Jon Kyl Berates Obama For Focus On Middle Class:

Declaring that the use of the phrase "middle class" is "misguided and wrong and even dangerous," Kyl argued in a Senate floor speech that Obama is "spreading economic resentment [that] weakens American values" and ignoring "the uniquely meritocratic basis of our society."

“We have a president who talks incessantly about class, particularly the middle class,” Kyl said.

"I just think the whole discussion of class is wrong. It's not what we do here in America," said Kyl, the Senate minority whip. He added, "I don't think there's anything called 'middle class values' that are different from the values of other people in this country. Tell me what's different about the values of someone who the president identifies as middle class?"

Oy! OK, you pimp for plutocrats, let me count some ways.

Jon Kyl was the lead sponsor for a $250 billion amendment to slash estate taxes for the heirs of multimillion-dollar estates, i.e., the "Paris Hilton Amendment" for the idle children of the super rich. The Founding Fathers wanted a "meritocracy," to which Kyl pays lip service, and despised the aristocracy – the privileged minority upper class, usually of inherited wealth and social position. Estate tax and the founding fathers: You can't take it with you | The Economist.

Jon Kyl aka Senator Obstruction is a key GOP leader in its strategy of holding America hostage to make permanent the Bush tax cuts for the top two percent of income earners. He was also a key leader in holding America hostage last summer over the federal debt ceiling that resulted in the downgrade of the credit of the U.S. for the first time in our history, again over making permanent the Bush tax cuts for the top two percent of income earners.

Kyl also opposed the modest reforms of Dodd-Frank, the Volcker Rule, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau enacted in the wake of his bankster friends on Wall Street blowing up our financial system with speculative gambling on casino capitalism and taking our economy down with it. Kyl wanted his bankster friends to be able to continue to shake down the American middle class and swindle them out of their last dime before foreclosing on their property and kicking them to the curb.

And when American middle class workers lost their jobs in the Bush Great Recession because of Jon Kyl's bankster friends on Wall Street, what did Jon Kyl do? Why of course, he attempted to block the extension of unemployment benefits to the unemployed.  Senator Obstruction, Jon Kyl, thinks the unemployed are just lazy; Senator Obstruction, Jon Kyl, obstructing unemployment benefits extension.

And then there are Jon Kyl's super wealthy friends, like Willard "Mittens" Romney, whose "values" inform them that it is somehow patriotic to secret away their wealth in Swiss bank accounts and offshore tax avoidance havens like the Caymen Islands to avoid paying U.S. taxes. Wealth hoarding in offshore tax havens by the super rich. This tax avoidance by corporations and the super rich only adds to our national deficit that Kyl only pretends to care about. Deficit fraud Sen. Jon Kyl.

Maybe Jon Kyl should check with super rich guy Warren Buffett, who told the truth when he said "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a short story titled “Rich Boy.” It was later published in a popular book of his short stories titled All the Sad Young Men (1936). The story begins with this passage:

"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different."

F. Scott Fitgerald also observed in The Great Gatsby:

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

As well as this quote that Jon Kyl may want to keep in mind:

“Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”

I don't know where Jon Kyl has lived his life, but all American elections for at least the past century have been directed at the American middle class in rhetoric, if not substantive policy, by both political parties. It is what we do here in America. For Jon Kyl to unilaterally decree by authoritarian edict that the use of the term "middle class" is now forbidden because it gives the super wealthy putocrats whom he serves a sad that the "peasants" are not idolizing their betters is the epitomy of class arrogance.