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If you don’t believe that Fox Newsies would love nothing better than to go back to the feudal system where those with money and property rule the rest of us, check out guest John Tamny’s remarks on Fox & Friends this morning where he pointedly said our country is “blessed by the efforts of the relatively few. (The) one percent.” Implicit in the sentiment is that the rest of us are just schlubs who should kowtow to their greatness – and give them more money.

Despite the fact that the election could be seen as a referendum on Americans’ support for the middle class, Fox has spent the days since then waging class warfare in an effort to paint Obama voters as welfare queens just looking for more stuff.

Meanwhile, they applaud those one percenters who want more stuff in the way of tax cuts. There’s no way that Fox & Friends didn’t know that was the kind of cheerleading they’d get when they booked John Tamny on the show this morning. This is the same guy who said just a few months ago on Fox that police and firefighters should be thanking us for their cushy livelihoods at our expense.

In a discussion about the “burden of looming taxes,” as the banner on the screen put it, co-host Dave Briggs asked Tamny if the Bush tax cuts would end for those making more than $250,000 a year as President Obama has been such a “stickler” for.

TAMNY: I don’t think so. I think actually they won’t come to an end because Democrats, conversely, don’t want major reductions in spending and so if you hit the cliff, it wouldn’t just be taxes going up, it would be spending going down and we know that politicians love to spend money. So my guess is that they’re actually going to get some sort of extension of the Bush tax cuts. And that’s very good for the economy, lest we forget we are blessed by the efforts of the relatively few. That one percent is Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com CEO), that’s Fred Smith of FedEx, that’s the late Steve Jobs (of Apple). You want to remove the barriers to their production, not raise them.

You can hear one of the hosts agreeing with Tamny off camera.

For instance, David Koch donated $1,000,000 to the Republican Governor's Association on February 1, 2012, which coincidentally was the same day Governor Walker signed a bill into law expanding the "open enrollment" period for public schools which is all part of the effort to turn Wisconsin public schools into a "free market." The Koch-funded MacIver Institute crowed all over the lovely "free education market," thanks to Scott Walker. Also on that day, Democrats revealed three candidates running against Wisconsin state senators up for recall. While it's unclear that the million donated was for Scott Walker, I note that Scott Walker is the only guy in need of the billionaire backing at this particular moment in time.

Scott Walker's out-of-state support has been remarkable. Out of the $4.5 million he raised in the first quarter of 2012, nearly $4 million came from out-of-state donors in the five-week period before the limits on donations for the recall kicked in, and most donors were boys sitting at the Billionaire Boys' Club table. Here are a few notable out-of-state names, industries and donation amounts:

• Stanley Herzog, MO (Construction) $250,000
• Robert Perry, TX (Construction) $250,000
• Sarah Atkins, MO (Building Products) $250,000
• David C Humphreys, MO (Building Products) $250,000
• Trevor Rees-Jones, TX (Big Oil) $100,000
• Bruce Covner, NY (Hedge Funds) $100,000
• John M Templeton, Jr, PA (Investments) $30,000

Wealthy Wisconsinites ponied up, too. Here are a few:

• Mary Sue Shannon, $100,000. Mrs Shannon is married to Michael Shannon, managing director of KSL Capital Partners, LLC

, a Denver investment company

• Robert Kerbell, $50,000. Mr. Kerbell is the CEO of Lorman Education Services, a company that provides online continuing education seminars.
• Ostrom, Vostors and Willer are all affiliated with or own Milksource, LLC. They donated a combined $91,000 to the effort.

Walker has a lot of money in his war chest with the promise of more where that came from. After all, those out-of-state donations come from a short list of right-wing insiders, some Koch and others not. Assume there are plenty more where that came from and they're not afraid to spend it to keep him in that governor's mansion. Phone banks, dirty ads, mailers, and the full faith and credit of Koch-based organizations like Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks will keep Walker fully supplied with the ground troops to wage his war.

It will take all of the 99 percent to push back and win against Walker.

This new generation of Republicans, the self-styled Tea Partiers, want to repeal just about all of the 20th century. They don’t like Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ, or any of those Kennedy brothers. They say they want to repeal child labor laws, the 40 hour work week, food safety laws, environmental laws, the income tax, direct election of Senators, Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage, banking regulation, Pell Grants, Head Start, civil rights, voting rights, and just about every other form of progress the 1900s brought us. You know, William Buckley used to say that “a conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling stop.” These guys are standing athwart history yelling “go back!” They will happily shut down government at the drop of a hat, for any reason at any time- even when they get what they asked for in terms of policy concessions. Backed by the 1%, the Wall Street elite and the captains of industry who destroyed the economy but are deeply hurt and offended when anyone tries to hold them accountable for it, these Republicans are hell-bent are creating an economy based on the ideas of Ayn Rand and Gordon Gekko, where greed is good, generosity and kindness are weaknesses, and we are taught that it is everyone for themselves and devil take the hindmost.

And speaking of the Wall Street big boys (not being sexist, virtually all of them are) who are not just the top 1% but part of the top 0.1 %, they set new records in 2011 for arrogance that even I didn’t think they could. I had assumed that after some of their more ridiculous moments of the last few years (like one financier comparing Obama to a Nazi because he wanted to take away one of their loopholes), that their very well paid PR guys would tell them “hey, the anger level at us is really rising, we should try to avoid public displays of unbearable hubris”. But the PR team’s nightmares continue multiplying because of quotes like these referring to protesters, one 0.1 percenter said "who gives a crap about some imbecile?” And here’s another 0.1 percenter: “instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive.”

But this was also the year when the movement of, by, and for the bottom 99% started to rise up. This 99er movement is forcing economic issues- and yes, issues of class and economic inequity- onto the American table to be debated and talked about in new ways. The push and shove of these two fundamental ideas- that society should be organized on behalf of the 99% not the 1% vs. the Social Darwinism of greed being good- will dominate our political debate not only in 2012 but for years to come.

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