Ellington

Excellent column by Ole Miss professor Joe Atkins:

"The late Ronald Reagan used to claim Calvin Coolidge as his favorite president. Ah, the 1920s, those golden years of "Silent Cal" —Prohibition-happy preachers and bootleggers, union-busting police and National Guardsmen, unhinged Wall Streeters carving out a grand canyon between the rich and poor, a blissful and obliging press.[...]

"[T]he progeny continue to work hard to realize Ronald Reagan's dream and wage an all-out war on the most important New Deal legacy left by FDR, the vision of a society in which people actually work together rather than claw at each other's throat.

"In Bush we have a president whose own legacy will be massive tax cuts to the wealthy, a vengeful, bloody and tragic war, the outflow of millions of blue- and white-collar jobs, nothing less than class warfare on working-class Americans. Business Week, hardly a radical magazine, reported recently that one fourth of working Americans — 28 million of them — earn less than $9.04 an hour, poverty level for a family of four.
[...]
"It's the Wal-Marting of America. Vice President Dick Cheney believes Wal-Mart is "one of our nation's best companies," but the average wage of its 1.4 million workers is between $8 and $9.64 an hour (depending on your source). Many of them live below the poverty line and qualify for food stamps and Medicaid. Wal-Mart posted sales of $259 billion in 2003, the most of any publicly traded company, and the Waltons remain one of the world's richest families, but Wal-Mart workers don't reap the benefits.

"Haley Barbour wants to make Mississippi a microcosm of America. Now that he has successfully limited business and medical culpability in lawsuits by injured citizens, he is likely to turn his attention to Workers' Compensation or other perceived threats to the total and absolute rule of big business. Mississippi, recently ranked as one of the top states in the nation in the "wealth friendliness' of its taxation policies, will continue to be a great state for the rich and a miserable state for the poor."