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November 20, 2008

Rahm Emanuel and the Classless Society

Lee Cary
Rahm Emanuel co-authored a book that reads like the precursor to Obama's primary campaign document, Blueprint for Change, Obama and Biden's Plan for America.

Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed wrote The Plan, Big Ideas for America (copyright 2006, amazon.com link here).  We know who Emanuel is - he's about to become the second most powerful person in the federal government.  Reed, according to the book's jacket,

...writes a daily political column for Slate and is the editor-in-chief of Blueprint, the leading magazine of new Democratic ideas...He is President of the Democratic Leadership Council.    

Many of the key proposals in Obama's Blueprint document were aired-out in The Plan.  Here's a sample.

1. A new social contract - universal citizen service, universal college access, universal retirement savings, and universal children's health care - that makes clear what you can do for your country and what your country can do for you.

2. A return to fiscal responsibility and an end to corporate welfare as we know it.

3. Tax reform to help those who aren't wealthy build wealth.

4. A new strategy to use all of America's strengths to win the war on terror.

5. A Hybrid Economy that cuts America's gasoline consumption in half over the next decade. (pp.52-53)

Here's a quote for Joe the Plumber, of "spread the wealth" fame, to consider.  It explains what he heard from Obama that day.

Enabling individuals to save more will do a great deal for Americans' economic security. But in the global economy, we must find ways to spread the circle of wealth and opportunity as well.  Our country was founded on the principle that all men are created equal. For two centuries, the words of President Andrew Jackson have been an American mantra: "Equal opportunity for all, special privilege for none." Although we have yet to realize that goal, we aspire to be a classless society - a middle-class country in which the door of opportunity are open to all.  (p. 94) (emphasis added)

I confess I didn't know that we aspire to be a classless society. Must have sick that day and missed school.

One last quote:

[N]o credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of classes. What I did that was new was to prove...that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.

Emanuel and Reed didn't write that one. Karl Marx did in 1852.  (Since history stopped being taught in public schools decades ago, some younger readers may need to google "Karl Marx.")

Several of my friends voted for Obama on the premise that he would, when elected, govern from the center and not the far Left.  Their anger with Bush and the Republicans drove them to a willing suspension of critical thinking.  His selection of Emanuel as Chief of Staff is one early signal that their critical thinking yielded to wishful thinking.

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