Class War: Europe And Russia Are Moving Out Of  Welfare And ...[ NWS Note: This begins a series of what happened to the USSR people after it fell.]

    .... We - the USA -  Are Moving In Where They Left.   

When the rich declare to President Barack Obama that the “poor” who elected him to office are drinking their blood, there is no need to engage in guesswork – there is actually a class war we economically hurt Americans failed to notice.

       We just have to brace ourselves … the country is being driven towards a welfare state where European Union and Russia are moving out!

      Welfare spending in the United States this year 2009 alone explodes “upward by more than 20%, rising from $491 billion in FY 2008 to $601 billion …”[1] The exploding welfare spendathon is unprecedented in the history of the country.

      This addition to the national debt has been poorly calculated.  It is not $816 billion – it is $1.34 trillion, and the grand total cannot be written down yet because it is still a yearly running figure while Obama is in the driver’s seat, taking us for a ride towards socialism.

       But by this figure alone, approximately, $17,400 will be already taxed on every household in America. It will hit the roof beyond the possibility of being paid while we continue to count and suffer more painful days ahead; it is our trip ticket to where we are being driven to … towards a welfare state the Europeans and Russians found hard to live by as a way of life and are now trying like crazy to move out of it. Class war is on the verge of becoming a shooting war, God forbids!

      The Russians didn’t like it. Even the communist classless society is actually not classless.  But the Russians don’t want anymore to hide behind what the German Wall represents; they are no longer interested to raise a new Iron Curtain to blind the world of Russian poverty and how welfare is turning into a nightmare.

        Russians of the younger generation no longer want to be addressed as a sinister Iron Curtain hiding their poverty from the eyes of the world. They have made their choice – adopting the best part of the West’s free enterprise market strategy to suit their cultural tradition and implement the state’s modified ideological dream for autonomous development. And life for the ordinary Russian since the disintegration of the Soviet Union is just doing fine or as bearably uncomfortable as life is in the West due to recession. That being the case, they want the world to treat them fairly … no longer being eyed upon and/or watched suspiciously.

        On September 19, 2008, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev spoke to participants of the 2008 Olympics in Moscow’s Kremlin:

        "We are in effect being pushed down a path that is founded not on fully-fledged, civilized partnership with other countries, but on autonomous development, behind thick walls, behind an Iron Curtain …That is not our path. For us there is no sense going back to the past. We have made our choice."

       The path they chose is to be Westernized, and with it goes transparency.

       This is the picture of paucity and social neediness Medvedev wanted the world to see in Russia: Not otherwise revealed until recently, is the contradictory faces of poverty in the former Soviet Union. The “poor” shows the face of poverty as the government describes it, but live in expensive apartments, especially “in the center of Moscow” where they at the same time receive generous welfare benefits.

      This eye-opener may cure Obama’s apparent myopic disability in recognizing and admitting objectionable welfare assistance based on politically correct promises or commitment to millions of indigent political supporters across the country. In communist Russia, “social assistance does not always go to poverty alleviation.”  Blame it on politics.

       According to the “10th round of the Russian Longitudinal Monitory Survey [RLMS]” conducted by the Russian State Statistics Committee or the Goskomstat, the non-poor household receives 1.6 times more social services, and 1.6 times more quantity of benefits than the standardized well-off household.

       Overall, “… benefits for housing, utilities and telephone services given to non-poor households exceed those given to poor households by 1.3-1.8 times,” Goskomstat reported.

       It is a welfare distortion the Russians are running away from. It is where Obama is bringing us to.

       There is a crying need to shift social assistance out of Obama’s election promise that would destroy rather than ameliorate for the better, the disparate structure of our society. The teaching lesson to learn from Russia is clear enough; it must be taken to heart as a talking point if we have to embark in this adventure towards radical socialism.

      There is a truckload of problems to worry about before the on-going class war lapses into a civil war. I suggest that Obama must rationalize what kind of these millions of “poor” need to be on welfare to find a better fit between the “capabilities of public budgets” and the population of the economically disadvantaged that really need help. It wounds deeply if in funding this indiscriminate social amelioration program the American taxpayers are forced to pay more and more taxes year in and year out.

       Let us not forget that it was the imposition of taxes on the unrepresented that pushed us to wage a shooting war with England. It is a lesson of history that a confiscatory tax is a powder keg to a revolution.

        Paying more payola to the government in the form of heavier taxes to provide for the “poor” in an irrational way is the cause of the current dangerous resentment in Europe. The rebellion of rich countries threatens the solidarity of the EU. “From Antwerp to Milan, rich regions begin to resent [the] continent’s subsidy culture.” [The Guardian]

         Milan no longer wants to pay for Naples. Northerners hate to subsidize the “intrinsically lazy” Southerners.

        “The young in Catalonia feel that Spain is drinking our [their] blood," Ian Traynor in Bazel reported on “Divided Europe”.

         This situation is even worse in Belgium. The public sector payrolls in Wallonia are “twice” larger than those in Flanders. Vlaams Belang leader Filip Dwinter charged that “They're stealing our money with the collaboration of the government in Brussels. We're a hard-working people, very prosperous, low unemployment, and we're giving them €12bn (£8bn) every year to finance their social security.”

         There is also a social revolt in Brussels. An EU official said the rich people’s protest is “… a bun fight for money.”

         “Welfareism” is threatening the disintegration of Europe. Yugoslavia disintegrated in the 1990s, preceded by the separation of Slovenia “… by far the richest and most productive part, which was sick of seeing its taxes propping up regimes in Belgrade.”

          Rich countries in Europe only want a “square deal”. It does not sound right when the richer the country is, the more it is being taken advantage of.  This anomaly is the travail of Londoners that produce wealth over three times the average wealth of what the 500 million people produce in the whole of continental Europe.

     This wealth gap is replicated here in the United States. The wealthiest class of Londoners in Europe is more or less equivalent to about 10% of the richest Americans that socialist Obama targets for his “wealth redistribution” program he promised to millions of the American “poor” who made him president.

     Starting from the bottom of this targeted social class, President Obama would tax all Americans earning more than $125,000 a year because like the Londoners in Europe they have to be “punished” for being more productive! It is rather a macabre way of doing it as a form of punishment, and he does not need to be a radical socialist to make himself look weird.

      During the days of Dictator Joseph Stalin when Russia was fighting Hitler in WWII, this “state contribution” out of the earnings of the laboring class is far from being called a “penalty” or “punishment” imposed by the state [it is treason to dare calling it that way] – in fact the scalping is a financial sacrifice for the “love” of the fatherland.

     A huge part of that $125,000 or more annual income that is “confiscated” by the Obama government through taxation goes right into the nest of the needy in the alcove of the poor called welfare where open mouths await a feeding.

     What might be disquieting to contemplate is the possibility that Obama would decide to recommend a proposal to Congress to make a law defining as treason the mere act of calling his program to tax the rich a “punishment”. It is a blot to his father’s early struggle to build a castle of socialism in the sky and a roadblock to President Obama’s own dream for America  – to turn the country into a socialist republic with a government planned central economy founded on Stalinist collectivism.

     The feed to the poor comes from the sweat and blood of those who are working hard to earn their keeps in a free enterprise society. Like the wealthy young in Catalonia, hardworking well-to-do Americans feel that Obama’s millions of indolent electorates on welfare who elected him to office are in fact drinking their blood.

      There is a class war towards a classless society to where you and I are being taken for a ride.

       In the meantime, let’s brace ourselves for bigger troubles ahead. The path back to where we were before Obama entered the scene, no longer promises a reward of gold to gutsy entrepreneurs but a road paved with guns and goons that would take it away from them.  #

© Copyright Edwin A. Sumcad.  Access NWS June 18, 2009.

The writer is an award-winning journalist. Go to NWS homepage, click on the columnist button to know more about the author or you may e-mail your comment at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it  This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

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