(Jim Webb holding up the combat boots of his son who is serving in Iraq during a victory rally. He wore his son’s boots throughout his senatorial campaign: Image from Washington Post)
I have taken a particularly keen interest in the campaign of Jim Webb during the past election season. I didn’t know much about Webb until he caught the nation’s and my own attention due to the "macaca" gaffe by his opponent, Senator George Allen. Because of that incident, Webb became one of four political candidates who received campaign contributions from me this year. Also, it was heartening to see a pro-military man whose own son is serving in Iraq, speak out forcefully against the war there.
What I knew about Webb until now is that he was a conservative man who had served in conservative administrations. He comes from a military family, was Ronald Reagan’s Navy secretary and used to be an angry Vietnam veteran. Webb’s anger was different from John Kerry’s. Webb believed that veterans such as Kerry who protested the war, betrayed their fellow soldiers. Webb was in fact a soldier in the mold of John O’Neill, the leader of the Swift Boat veterans. He had once refused to shake Kerry’s hand. I was therefore greatly and pleasantly surprised when I came across this op-ed piece by Webb in the Wall Street Journal. In it he sounds like a man after my heart. If he truly sees things this way, I expect him to be a positive influence on the Democratic side of the senate where Trojan Horses like Lieberman will be lurking.
Class Struggle
American workers have a chance to be heard.
BY JIM WEBB
Wednesday, November 15, 2006 12:01 a.m. ESTThe most important–and unfortunately the least debated–issue in politics today is our society’s steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America’s top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country. Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to fight our wars. They own most of our stocks, making the stock market an unreliable indicator of the economic health of working people. The top 1% now takes in an astounding 16% of national income, up from 8% in 1980. The tax codes protect them, just as they protect corporate America, through a vast system of loopholes.
Incestuous corporate boards regularly approve compensation packages for chief executives and others that are out of logic’s range. As this newspaper has reported, the average CEO of a sizeable corporation makes more than $10 million a year, while the minimum wage for workers amounts to about $10,000 a year, and has not been raised in nearly a decade. When I graduated from college in the 1960s, the average CEO made 20 times what the average worker made. Today, that CEO makes 400 times as much.
In the age of globalization and outsourcing, and with a vast underground labor pool from illegal immigration, the average American worker is seeing a different life and a troubling future. Trickle-down economics didn’t happen. Despite the vaunted all-time highs of the stock market, wages and salaries are at all-time lows as a percentage of the national wealth. At the same time, medical costs have risen 73% in the last six years alone. Half of that increase comes from wage-earners’ pockets rather than from insurance, and 47 million Americans have no medical insurance at all.
Manufacturing jobs are disappearing. Many earned pension programs have collapsed in the wake of corporate "reorganization." And workers’ ability to negotiate their futures has been eviscerated by the twin threats of modern corporate America: If they complain too loudly, their jobs might either be outsourced overseas or given to illegal immigrants.
This ever-widening divide is too often ignored or downplayed by its beneficiaries. A sense of entitlement has set in among elites, bordering on hubris. When I raised this issue with corporate leaders during the recent political campaign, I was met repeatedly with denials, and, from some, an overt lack of concern for those who are falling behind. A troubling arrogance is in the air among the nation’s most fortunate. Some shrug off large-scale economic and social dislocations as the inevitable byproducts of the "rough road of capitalism." Others claim that it’s the fault of the worker or the public education system, that the average American is simply not up to the international challenge, that our education system fails us, or that our workers have become spoiled by old notions of corporate paternalism."
There is more. Looks like Webb is an opinionated man. He is talking the straight talk that I want Democratic leaders to echo. Will he now also walk the walk? I hope so. He sure has a sturdy pair of boots!
Accidental Blogger 