Wisconsin – buzzkill
I’ll be the skunk at this party, what the hell. I don’t know how to cheer-lead.
The lefty-liberal-progressives of the US of A are pumped up by the show of defiance by public sector workers in Wisconsin; and other states are following suit with demonstrations and Democratic state legislators on the lam. Even the Egyptians are wearing cheese-head hats. I am proud of the Wisconsin workers, and that’s why my prognosis is all the sadder. They were undercut years ago by the Democratic Party and their own leadership.
The unions and the public workers are going to lose. I’d love to be proven wrong, and maybe my math is no good, but even if they don’t lose this one, the trade union movement in the United States has been a dead letter for quite some time now. This will be another triumph of ideology for the right, and a political triumph for the right, too – no matter how Pyrrhic the victory in the truly terrifying scheme of things for the next generation.
When the trade union movement decided to join itself at the hip with the Democratic Party, they brought this on themselves. They consistently spend members’ money on Dem politicians, making them a direct target of the Republicans, who represent many anti-union interests already, but who had now been given a direct political stake in busting the unions.
Business unionism, nationalism, and bureaucratism ensured that the hierarchy of the trade union movement would call to the hierarchy of the political party. Everyone became players in a game that the unions quite simply could not win. Union resources are a Piper Cub against the business class’s F-16. In no time at all, the unions came to depend on the Democrats, and on elections, instead of facing of against employers directly and without the legal sanctions that they accepted ever since Taft-Hartley.
Democrats pushed through one neoliberal measure after another, undercutting the unions, and like an abused spouse that can’t leave, union leadership sent their members back again and again to vote, vote, vote Democratic.
Enough grousing. Here are the numbers.
In 1945, at the peak of US union density, 36% of US workers were represented by a union. Today, that number is 11.9% and falling. Last year, it was 12.3%.
In 1945, non-agricultural, private sector workers represented 33.9% of union membership nationwide. Public workers were 9.8%. Today, 36.2% of union workers are public workers, and non-ag private sector workers are 6.9%.
Total US union membership today is around 16 million, in a population of 307 million, with around 150 million on-the-books as workers. Loose math, but you get the picture.
The highest union density is in New York with 24.2%. The lowest is North Carolina with 3.2%. Wisconsin is 14.2%; and Wisconsin voters – knowing damn well that Republicans are anti-union – elected Scott Walker as Governor with 52.3% against Tom Barrett, who received 46.5% of the 2010 Wisconsin vote. Even long time Senator Russ Feingold was displaced by Republican Ron Johnson in a 51.9% to 47% race.
The Wisconsin Democrats are so powerless that a few can do is disappear while Walker fires state workers. There’s not a thing else they can do; and Walker can completely ignore the noisy crowds outside his door.
The workers who used to have the ability to turn off the tap on the economy – production, transportation, and materials moving – are a mere 16% of the union total nationwide, their latent power irretrievably diluted. School teachers can’t do that; and there is a vast reservoir of underemployed young people with Master’s Degrees.
The political consequences will be marginal for Republicans. Polls now show that only 48% of Americans support unions at all; and 51% believe that unions “hurt the economy.” That is how successfully the neoliberal ideology has been grafted onto our psyches.
This national Republican campaign was launched fully cognizant of the balance of forces, and the reason they went green-light on it is because the numbers worked.
It’s a real shame. And we seem to know that Republicans will be Republicans. We ought to, criminy! When will we learn what the Democrats are, and how for decades they have prepared this historic defeat of workers.
I hope they prove me wrong.
Curt:
If you read the above article and you do not know anything about trade unions in Europe I recommend that you google it.
25 February 2011, 6:36 pmSincerely,
Commrade Curt
Victor:
The term “bridge too far” has been used quite a bit about this, but it is a more apt metaphor than the left seems to realize. Operation Market Garden was a tactical disaster for the allies, but it had no effect on the ultimate course of the war, because Germany had already been defeated on a strategic level. The Republicans made many mistakes in trying this is Wisconsin, but the war against unions is already over in the united states, and it is just a question of time before government workers (with the possible exception of police and prison guards) lose the collective bargaining rights that those of us in the private workforce have not had in at least a generation.
When having a union becomes a special right reserved only for people working for the government, it is not “sustainable” (to use that awful buzzword). Solidarity is a two way street, and it is absurd to expect people working for $9 an hour to support a union movement that has long since abandoned them.
It is also an ugly fact that the total failures of the American public education system have everything to do with a country full of people so stupid that they listen to Glenn Beck. The teachers (and their unions) do in fact have something to do with that.
The Republicans have a strategy that is delusional and self destructive. We have no strategy at all. So even when they lose by blowing themselves up, and we gain an advantage, we can never profit by it and they can always recover. This is how we went for the almost unbelievable democratic victories of 2008 to the election of the tea bag republicans in less than two years.
26 February 2011, 2:18 pmWinston Warfield:
Well, I went to a Wisconsin-support protest in Boston this week, and there was pretty spirited fight in the crowd. It wasn’t your usual granola-leftie greyheads I’ve gotten used to, isolated and ignored like Hyde Square ranters. These were mostly Bud drinkers and looked to be almost all 20-30-somethings. Younger people are pretty freaked out about the future these days. The youth demographic part was upbeat. However, the speakers were heavily laden with Democratic hacks, some of whom I know personally to be insectoid. The Tea Party Brownshirts were there pumping the working-class-suicide line of lock-step worship of Amercorp, but heavily outnumbered, and didn’t dare cause any trouble, what with union guys spoiling for a fight. The interesting thing was the signage, however, some of which called for an Egypt-style uprising. One rank-and-file speaker focused on the “American Dream”, and unions’ supposed ability to maintain or resurrect it. It was bittersweet; the crowd you could tell all knew it’s dead. Where this’ll go? I dunno. I kind of think things are going to have to get a whole lot more difficult to break the hold right-wing ideology has on Americans, like trying to make it on $2 a day as is the repeated stat I keep hearing about the massing angry crowds in North Africa and the M.E.
26 February 2011, 2:29 pmMark folk:
the current upsurge is a great step forward historicaly for the American people against despotic American neo-power.
1. It increases the understanding that the destruction of the unions by the American form of Globalization whas a partial destruction of ALL instiutions of people power, currently directed at public employment unions.
2. It allies the American uprising with the uprising in the Muslim couonteries, putting the American people on a trajectory of opposing American imperialism. Racism has been a standard historical way that the White ruling class manipulated the White population, and there is a beginning to the long path toward a multirational uprising. Over half of the babies born in the US currently are non-White.
3. It demonstrates the relation of the ruling class to the policical parties. the fake call to Gov Walker by a presumed Koch brother illustrates how the parties take their orders from plutocrats.
4. The only defense the Dems had was to run away, since their historical function has neveer been to mobilize the people. On the contrary, their frunction has been to difuse, divert and blunt opposition to the plutocracy. In a biopartisan way, since the plutes funance both parties. Whit the people and the young fighting and the Dems running, to increases the possibility of a break with the Dems.
However it may well be true that the union movement of the 20th century may not be effective in the 21st. The reason is that the plutocracy controls the truth media as part of their control of econcomic production. therefore the people must form co-ops, perhaps, to get an economic basis for challenging the plutes, just as capitalism grew up in the cracks of feudalism. US steel union is now considering a relation with the largest co-op, the Spanish based Pendragon. These co-ops must fosster a people ideology if they are to be politically effective.
26 February 2011, 3:40 pmCharles:
**********************
http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml
The Wisconsin Lie Exposed – Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Employee Pensions
26 February 2011, 4:30 pmCharles:
When having a union becomes a special right reserved only for people working for the government, it is not “sustainable” (to use that awful buzzword). Solidarity is a two way street, and it is absurd to expect people working for $9 an hour to support a union movement that has long since abandoned them.
^^^^^^^
26 February 2011, 4:34 pmIt’s not unionized public workers’ fault that most private sector workers aren’t choosing unions for themselves. It’s the bosses’ fault
Charles:
Trade union membership in the US started to fall when they purged the Reds during McCarthyism ( McCarthy being from Wisconsin coincidently). They then abandoned class struggle trade unionism for class collaboration and business unionism. Walther Reuther was a main leader who carried this out.
Working class needs a march on Wall Street.
26 February 2011, 4:38 pmCharles:
^^^^^^^^^^^
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/weigel/archive/2011/02/22/madison-afl-cio-endorses-general-strike.aspx
Weigel : Madison AFL-CIO Endorses General Strike
http://www.slate.com
Motion 1: The SCFL endorses a general strike, possibly for the day Walker signs his “budget repair bill,” and requests the Education Committee immediately begin educating affiliates and members on the organization and function of a general strike.
Motion 2: The SCFL goes on record as opposing all provisions contained in Walker’s “budget repair bill,” including but not limited to, curtailed bargaining rights and reduced wages, benefits, pensions, funding for public education, changes to medical assistance programs, and politicization of state government agencies.
26 February 2011, 4:45 pmMark folk:
David Lindorff of Counterpunch and other blogs has disclosed a puzzling but explosive fact now being discussed by Pakistani and India newspapers. ‘diplomat Raymond Davis,’ the US Contractor, has been apparently recruiting people for the terrorist organizations of the Pakistani Taliban, and the TTP. Both are listed as terrorist organaizations by Pakistan and the US. The US is publically against these organizations. Why would they have a US Contractor recruiting for them? But about 30 calls in his cell phones indicate that he was. No wonder Obama personally intervened to get Davis out of Pakistan.
This caper, largely concealed as much as possible by the US media, may well be the most historically signifant event of the current uprisings. Pakistan has 180 million people, a corrupt military government, and a rising population. It is conceviable, if unlikely, that it could take a central role in the Muslim uprisings. But if these reports are true, it is likely that they will diminish or even end the leadership of the US of Nato in Afghanistan.
MODERATOR: This is the Wisconsin thread. Wisconsin. Five will get you ten Davis is not a contractor. My bet is that he is active duty military.
27 February 2011, 3:28 pmGuy Montag:
Yeah, Stan’s right about the union’s losing. I’m on the receiving end in MI where they’re going after police & fire unions big-time. It’s not about the facts, or the merits, it’s about power.
Here it’s a bit more subtle than WI, but the same effect. For example, an emergency financial manager law passed the House last week. Governor Synder pushed some cities into worse financial shape by cutting off revenue sharing, then He’ll appoint a EFM who will tear up all contracts and take over the pension fund.
The Union movement died in 1947 with the passage of Taft-Hartley that outlawed all the stuff that actually worked to unionize in the 30′s (sit-down strikes, honoring picket lines, sympathy strikes, etc). In ’48 the unions didn’t throw in with Henry Wallace, shortly after they participated in the purge of all the leftists in the unions. The death of the unions has been a long-time coming.
27 February 2011, 3:38 pmMark folk:
the death of the unios has been greatly exaggerated. The uprisings in the Muslim countries, Europe and the US is not about unions, but about the working class gaining power. The question is historical, not the result of any one battle. discouraging these battles, howeveer, gives aid and comfort to the plutocracy. Since anti-union vilification has occurred in the US for the past 30 years in an increasing rescendo, to is natural for people to join in who stand on the sidelines and jeer. But looking to the long view, and to the future rather than the past, these uprisings are part of the struggle of the people in humanity’s lengthy and continuing war for human liberation.
28 February 2011, 2:54 pmDeAnander:
A public union employee, a tea party activist, and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, turns to the tea partier and says, “Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.”
– joke making the Internet rounds this week.
1 March 2011, 12:49 amMark folk:
Sirhan Sirhan is up for parale again and CNN actually has an article on the Robert Kennedy assassination. It includes comments by a labor leader Paul Shrade who I met at at labor conference in the 1980′s. He was a raving paranoid who maintained that some of the shots in the assanssination came from behind Kennedy. Seeming to think this important because Sirhan was in front of him, picking facts out of the thin air as paranoid crackpots will. The LAPD officers, who were long time associates of the CIA, explained to him that this could not be true, but he mainstained his paranoid story and was fired from his labor job. Paranoid conspiracy theories are very dangerous in the US.
The coronor, Dr. Noguichi, also a raving paranoid, maintained in his cornorers report that Kennedy was killed by a shot tot he back of the head of a few inches, ruling out Sirhan. His paranoid autopsy report was kept secret, and he was fired from his job as cornorer for being paranoid. The Japanese community responded to the obvious racism of the firing and he was rehired. OF course the CNN article mentions none of this, paranoiod conspiracies bein Unmentionable in the media.
2 March 2011, 12:54 pmCharles:
White supremacy is a big part of the Michigan picture. But the main goal is for the rich to take more from the working class Rainbow: Red, Yellow, White, Brown and Black.
http://michigancitizen.com/white-supremacy-surges-in-michigan-state-government-p9524-76.htm
http://conversations.blackvoices.com/bv-caucus/dc0db6af252445b58dc4aeeaa7cff29f/Detroit-is-Haiti-Unforgivably-Black/024fa926f43247b2994fc70ee8d5c684?sn=0
2 March 2011, 1:15 pmCharles:
More on Michigan struggle:
http://www.detnews.com/article/20110302/POLITICS02/103020373/1022/Opposition-to-pension-tax-grows
^^^^^^
2 March 2011, 1:16 pmCurt:
Why should pension income be untaxed? Is pension income more deserved than income from laying bricks or milking cows? Who has the highest pension incomes?
2 March 2011, 2:16 pmOf course it can be very progressively taxed just like salaries could be progressively taxed. Then agains maybe niether salaries or pensions should be taxed. Maybe all taxes should come from business taxes so that normal people do not need to deal with taxes. Every business has an accountant, at least a part time one.
If the US would impliment a Parecon economy and people can not amass stocks and real estate the ways for the rich to earn unearned income will become very limited.
I almost wrote stocks and BONDS in the previous sentence but I am not sure how bonds would work in a parecon economy. I think that bonds would probably still be issued.
I think that the libertarian arguement that allowing the government to have a monopoly on funds for capital investment is not a good system of checks and balances sounds sound. Yet I think that a rate of return 1/2 of one percent over the expected rate of inflation would be considered the standard rate. I imagine that parecon bishops and deacons have already given this some thoght. Anyways should pension income be untaxed? That is the question before you here today?
Charles:
Because such a tax hits mainly the working class. Tax the rich ! Lower working class taxes.
2 March 2011, 5:35 pmCharles:
Expropriate Wall Street ,and the budgets of the federal govt and all the states and cities will be balanced for decades. Also, cut the military budget drastically, and the fed budget will be really balanced good.
2 March 2011, 5:37 pmCurt:
If a pension tax were progressive it wouild not mainly tax the working class. Is it true that weatlthy people do not have nice fat pensions? I suspect that they have pensions that pay 10x more money than a working peraon takes home in a year.
2 March 2011, 6:24 pmRobert Karaffa:
Why do we talk about taxes, working class, rich people, unions?….the whole system is based on commodification, air money, finance and speculation…all discussion of anything else is practical on a certain level.. but ultimately useless. We can have “policy” discussions..we can talk about legislation…..but why waste our own time…This crap is over. There will be no meaningful action toward equity on any level.. we’re on to re-raping Africa and finishing off the middle income accumulated wealth of the burbs in the US. What again is the US Offense…oops “Defense” budget? How many bases do we have? The union busting is about balancing budgets? When it takes 1.2 million dollars to sustain and fuel one troop in Afganistan for a year. Grow food. Raise Chickens. Goats. Cattle if you can. Or forget that and tap into the amazing potential of so many crops you can grow in almost any part of the US. Buy solar while you can afford it. Collect rain water and channel it. If you like fast cars….buy those that the rich discard..I know dissonance there but Im a driver. Sheesh these times totally amaze me and I am very very afraid for anyone living in the United States of America that is under the age of 16. And I have a 2 year old grandchild.
2 March 2011, 11:12 pmMark folk:
The reason for talking is to create a people’s truth consensus, formulated from he perspective of the population, that opposes the mainstream truth consensus formulated from the perspective of power. The mainstream truth tradition, produced by the learned and mass media and other truth organs, emphasizses those truths that serve the interests of power and de-emphasizies to the point of exclusion those truths that inconvenience or subvert power.
3 March 2011, 10:44 amUntil people can perceive reality, especially political and social reality, from our own perspective, we will support those policies that serve the interests of the American power that is oppressing us.
Robert Karaffa:
Thanks Mark folk. I was just bolstering myself with this exact argument before reading your post. My above is vented frustration. Was bout ready to run around my little town naked in a cowboy hat at midnight screaming my way through each pub as I went!
3 March 2011, 3:15 pmBut…..I whined here instead.
Charles:
Just tax the “pensions” of the rich,not those of regular people.
But the rich don’t need pensions. They are loaded.
3 March 2011, 5:06 pmCharles:
You mean the budget of the War Department (smile)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_War
The United States Department of War, also called the War Department (and occasionally War Office in the early years), was the United States Cabinet department originally responsible for the operation and maintenance of the United States Army. The War Department also bore responsibility for naval affairs until the establishment of the Navy Department in 1798 and for most land-based air forces until the creation of the Department of the Air Force in 1947. The Secretary of War headed the war department throughout its existence.
The War Department existed from 1789 until September 18, 1947, when it split into Department of the Army and Department of the Air Force and joined the Department of the Navy as part of the new joint National Military Establishment (NME), renamed the United States Department of Defense in 1949.
The Secretary of War, a civilian with such responsibilities as finance and purchases and a minor role in directing military affairs, headed the War Department
3 March 2011, 5:08 pmChris S.:
“…it is absurd to expect people working for $9 an hour to support a union movement that has long since abandoned them.”
3 March 2011, 10:10 pmThe union movement hasn’t abandoned them, they’ve bought the bosses’ rhetoric and abandoned each other.
Mark folk:
globalization conducted by both the Dems and Repubs has largely destroyed unions in the US in the private sector, and now they are going after unions in the public sector. Unions have traditionally led the population, especially the working population, against the power of the US plutocracy. The destruction of the power of people institutions, and the increase in money of the billionaires and near billionaires of the plutocracy has increasingly unbalanced the class struggle in favor of the rich, a fraction of !% of the population.
The consequence is that the corporate media, owned by a few huge corporations and financed by the advertising of other corporations and media, can indoctrinate the American people to identify with the interests of power, rather than the interests of the population ruled by power. This is a bipartisan effort by the two parties and the lefish and rightish mainstream and alternative media.
80% to 90% of the ruling class are Repubs according to the sociologist William Domhoff, but they finance Dems and “Progressives” as well to serve their interests. The Repubs pull the mainstream truth consensus to the right and the Dems neutralize, distract and diffuse opposition to the rightwing pull. Although a Lesser Evil in any one electoral struggle, the Dems are a Greater Evil over an historical sequence of Elections, because they prevent the population from mobilizing against the plutocracy. And the Dems and Repubs both support American imperialism in foreign policy, the Dems often even more militaristic than the Repubs.
The American people are being led into barbarism historically by American power. We must therefore unite effectively in some way against American power to promote our own interests. But we are taught from childhood by the American truth organs to be Patriotic, and operatively this is not a support of the American homeland, but the support of the American plutocracy. We are indoctrinated to emotionally identify with Purple Mountains and Fruited Plains while operatively supporting American empiralism directed against the American population as well as against the people of the world. The American plutocracy would stripmine the Purple Mountains and pave over the Fruited Plains if there were any money in it. The American people must therefore oppose American power, and work out a way of doing so effecively to replace the organization of people power that the major parties helped to destroy.
4 March 2011, 10:30 amCharles:
the Dems are a Greater Evil over an historical sequence of Elections, because they prevent the population from mobilizing against the plutocracy
^^^^^^^
It’s more like the population, with Reagan, lurched to the right and yanked the Dems right. The romanticizing the US people as radical and spontaneously mobilizing against the plutocracy is a fundamental illusion of this line that the Dams forestall “mobilization” and radical action by the American people. The American people aren’t radical. They bought into Reaganism directly, not because the Dems “fooled” them.
When the US population was more mobilized left in the 60′s, they moved the Dems and Reps to the left. Johnson jumped way left domestically and even resigned due to criticism over the war. Even Nixon had to support policies that would be called “liberal/socialist” by today’s Republican/Tea Partiers.
That the Dems are fooling the People is a “cart-before-the-horse-” notion.
4 March 2011, 2:01 pmm.c.:
The last post was by me. I made a mistake on my email.
4 March 2011, 2:43 pmMark folk:
I never said, and don’t believe, that any population is radical and spontaneously mobilizies against power. I think that people have a biological-cultural tendency to identfy with power, including the power that oppresses them. This childish need to identify with power was outlined in a simple way by Freud in his short essay on religious delusions FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION.
But this impulse in times of needed change is self-defeating. At these times, the population needs to throw up leaders who can lead them to oppose the power that is oppressing them. Both the Dems and Repubs support the power that is oppressing the American people, under the guise of opposing it. Both Dem and Repubs campaign electorally against the political Elite in Washington, who they will join once elected. They are all financed by the plutocracy precisely for this purpose.
But Americans cannot conceive, and do not want to know, how massively and systematically we have been deluded by power. This denial is the opposite side of delusion, primarily Patriotic delusion. We cannot tell the simple truth about people and power because this conflicts sharply with the Patriotic truth that Americans have been taught from childhood, when we are most impressionable, credulous and powerless to resist authority.
Americans are highly Patriotic. All American children in school are required to recite Patriotic loyalty oaths every day. They pledge allegiance to the Flag so when someone in authority waves it, American youths are predisposed to march off to kill, mutilate, rape, torture and terrorize youths waving a differently colored flag. This Patriotic indoctrination is endorsed by both the Dems and Repubs, who could only oppose it by being Unpatriotic.
I happen to be very Unpatriotic myself, and think that the development of Unpatriotic leaders of the American people would lead them to struggle against plutocratic power. This would be an historical task, because Patriotic Americans have an anti-people ideology. It is this anti-people ideology that attributes the reaction into barbarism of the US to the people, not to American power.
4 March 2011, 4:07 pmStan:
The Democrats in the last general election were not pulled right. The Change and Hope Leader campaigned in the opposite direction that he went upon assuming office. Joaquin Bustelo was right: The Democratic Party is the roach motel of social movements. You check in, and you never check out. The Democratic Party, and in particular the war criminal Barack Obama, drew an entire antiwar movement into it, where that movement was suffocated… and he now slaughters people abroad (and overthrows popular elected governments) with the same enthusiasm as his Texas predecessor.
The Democratic Party and the Republican Party do have that kind of power, because that power is structured in such a way that it is insulated from popular infyence. The propaganda commentariat only consolidates that structural full-nelson.
This mental construction that there is some simple dialectical circuit between the masses and the state is nonsensical. Magical thinking. The state and the ruling class have long since ensured, by manifold means, that there is no such circuit… beginning with the Constitution of the United States, written by elite white men who wanted nothing to do with popular democracy. Nowadays, the firewalls include winner-takes-all elections, privatized campaign financing, limited ballot access, the shell-game between the executive-judicial-legislative branches, massive patronage, and universal technocratic dependency.
5 March 2011, 8:28 amMark folk:
And there is no way to hold candidates to the promises they make on the issues. In this respect Obama is following the tradition of other Dem presidents. Wilson in 1916, Roosevelt in 1940, and Johnson in 1964, either explicitly or implicitly campaigned on a ‘no war’ pledge, and immediately on gaining office, inveigled the US into war.
Obama implicitly campaigned against the whole War on Terrorism, what was implied by Hope n Change, and on gaining office, continued Bush’s policies, except where he expanded them. The current duplicity and irrationality of the American power system is merely and exaggeratiion and extention of historical duplicity of plutocratic Democracy, where the candidates of both parties are financed by the plutes. Now the parties are supported by the neo-plutes– neolibs, neocons and neo-Zionists.
5 March 2011, 11:30 amm.c.:
I guess my post didn’t go through. The point was Nixon offered a health care plan in 1974 which didn’t make it through a Dem controlled congress. Ted Kennedy was preparing to run for pres in 76 and had an incentive to help thwart it. The plan offered universal coverage according to the Nixon people and was probably slightly to the left of Obama’s plan last year. On the domestic policy front, this is one refrence point to use that in the last 40 years Big National Politics has lurched to the Right. Clinton was probably no more leftist than Reagan; the Dems might be where Nixon was.
6 March 2011, 4:44 pmStan:
Different time, different system. Left and right doesn’t really transcend the difference unphased, imo. Not being argumentative, just sayin’. With the Mexican crisis during the Reagan era, the US stumbled into neoliberalism, which was about more than dismantling Keynesian New Deal programs. It was a phase-shift in the way global capitalism was organized and managed.
6 March 2011, 4:57 pmCharles:
Another version of this joke:
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker invites a billionaire, a factory worker, and a
7 March 2011, 8:37 am> teacher over to the mansion for some snacks and sets out a dozen cookies.
> Without saying a word, the billionaire takes 11 cookies for himself. Walker
> then turns to the factory worker and says, “You better watch out for that
> teacher. She’s going to try to steal your cookie.”
Charles:
I think that people have a biological-cultural tendency to identfy with power, including the power that oppresses them. This childish need to identify with power was outlined in a simple way by Freud in his short essay on religious delusions FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION.
^^^^
This is an interesting theory. It sort of a “Stockholm Syndrome” ( kidnapper identifying with kidnappers; Patty Hearst being a famous US example) theory of oppressed classes. I’d suspect that this identification is somewhat coerced. Sure a slave “identifies” with the master , because that’s the best way to avoid the lash. And that is a biological-culturally based inclination. Avoiding pain and death, self-preservation _is_ biologically based. It’s instinctive. And it is “childish” in that children have is most purely. I wouldn’t say it is childish in the sense of foolish.
See Br’er Rabbit. He “identifies” with the Master (giggles)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%27er_Rabbit
^^^^^^^^^^
7 March 2011, 8:48 amMichael Anderson:
And the Wisconsin Senate just pulled a procedural maneuver out of the hat to get the union-busting bill passed—no quorum needed for measures that don’t cost the taxpayers (!) any money. Don’t tell me it wasn’t known about.
Interesting precedent—-since taking money away from people doesn’t cost the people anything, well, then, no permission, procedure or due process needed.
9 March 2011, 9:57 pmCF Oxtrot:
The Democrats have always been on the “right” in a right/left spectrum. Their big accomplishments were rightist, with left window dressing (New Deal, e.g.)
Pull the curtain down. Don’t just imagine it’s become transparent. Pull it down.
And stop imagining things ONLY in left/right contexts. Humans are far more complex than that simple model suggests.
10 March 2011, 1:10 pmm.c.:
I’m not a fan of Left/Right. I was only using Nixon & Obama’s Health Care plans for comparative reasons. Nixon was in deep hot water by 1974 because of his lies about the war in Vietnam and at home. His Health plan was a bone to the Dems who didn’t want. They wanted him. If they had signed it they could have impeached him anyway, and gotten universal coverage, although not a single payer probably. The result, we waited 40 years for a corporate health plan worse than what was on the table.
10 March 2011, 6:51 pmCurt:
CF Oxtrot, I support the institutional oppression of people that I do not like a lot. That black list includes military officers above the rank 07. OK all those in the military have not shown that they are one iota better than O7s and above but I am hopeful that they will see the light. Also on the list are members of Congress and the executive branch who would have a rank equivilent to miliary O7s, and government attorneys who have protected the countries rulers from revolutionaries, and the CEOs of Parmasutical companies and their collaborators who are a greater threat to the health and welfare of Americans than the Bloods and the Crypts by far, and Bangster CEOs, and the CEOs of MIC corporations, and the CEOs of the MSM, and CEOs of Cargill and that other mega large agrucultural corporation, and those inividuals promoting the idea that the US should attack Iran, and those individuals who support a two state solution for Palestine, and those individuals who support the idea that the second amendment allows US citizens to own as many weapons as they want of whatever type that they want, and gay bashers, and racists, and dealers of hard drugs such as angle dust, and parents who do not immunize thair children, parents who do not properly teach their children to question authority, and pimps, and johns, and those that think that the idea that human industry is causing global warming is a conspiracy, and that peak oil fear is caused by a conspiracy, and those who over use anti biotics in the raising of living stock, and members of the law enforcement community who do not think for themselves and get bent out of shape by a man who murders one person at a time but do not notice the systems that kill by the hundreds, thousans or hundreds of thousands, and even protect them in the process of not noticing them, people who do not list things in a proper order can also sometimes really piss me off. I do not think that it is enough though that they should be oppressed by the state institutions of oppression. Mocked maybe. Is mocking someone the same as oppressing them? I think that in some cases it could be.
10 March 2011, 7:17 pmStan:
FULL
11 March 2011, 8:16 pmMichael W Gooch:
Wish you were still on facebook! Mind if I post this?
15 March 2011, 12:39 pmCharles:
This is what a workers’ uprising looks like
http://www.peoplesworld.org/this-is-what-a-workers-uprising-looks-like/
Another sign of the times: In Madison, Wis., the scene one night during the occupation of the Capitol was thus: Some 600 people were spending the night there in sleeping bags, lying on their coats or sleeping on the bare marble floors. The Capitol police were ordered to disperse them. The chief of the Capitol police told the crowd about his orders and then told them he and his officers were not going to follow those orders but instead would sleep in with the demonstrators.
24 March 2011, 1:12 pmCharles:
@Curt: I’d move CEO’s and billionaires up to number one on the list.
24 March 2011, 1:13 pm