The Coalition Of The Willing

[ChipperbackDemocrat]

In my life, I have found Cheap Labor Conservatives to be like a scared child in a dark bedroom. They are always searching for the boogieman, whatever boogieman there is.
The Cheap Labor Conservative forces in our country need a boogieman and need a column of scared people who's fears can be easily played upon to the point of those people making detrimental choices that directly effect themselves.

The CLCs actions to key recent issues can be traced back to these simple concepts.

I've been to a couple of teach-ins on the health care question and at each one there has been a shrill. small force of people. A few of them where also at those Teabag Party rallies a few months ago. They seem to come from a basic mold. They are white, largely working class, many of whom at best got a high school education or perhaps community college. A fair number were in our armed services at one time. Nearly all of them would not get an invite to a Grover Norquist K-Street power lunch.

The more I look at the Cheap Labor Conservative approach, I find a very creeping subtle racism and authortarianism. At first, I thought it was just me but the more I notice, they more I see it but the target if this approach isn't the target many would think.

Our adversary likes to chide the "Race Hustling Poverty Pimp". The phrase they trot out when they attempt to make the Jesse Jacksons or Al Sharptons of the world the devil incarnate. They all but tried to slap the label on President Obama in the Gates controversy. They are trying to pin that label on Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

Our adversary has always hustled race and always hustled poverty. The only question is: Who Gets Hustled?

The people being hustled here are working class white folks.

I call the hustled "The Coalition Of The Willing".

I understand it is nothing new. Many on this forum understand this coalition, but its been a few decades since we've have a situation where the conflict between what Franklin Delano Roosevelt called "organized money" and our nation's laborers is so nakedly obvious. Its nakedly obvious to the Cheap Labor Conservatives who don't pretend to deny their true goal.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) said it best: "We can break Obama"

The Gates controversy and the whole birth certificate thing? One big head fake. Emphasize the concept of the "other". Paint the "other" as an elitist monster (Prof. Gate) who got snippy with "a ordinary working man like you" (Officer Crowley).
The elitist snob who "doesn't see America the way you and I do" (President Obama) isn't even one of you and shouldn't be eligible to lead you.
Never mind that the Gates controversy could have been easily avoided or that the "birther" issue has been roundly repudiated by the facts. The outrage of either isn't about the facts, its about marshalling the "Morans". Don't kid yourself, that is what that inner cabal of the Cheap Labor Conservative really see in the birthers, Teabagger, "freepers", and the likely Palin voter. By extension, they see the same in the very people who would benefit from seeing a Justice Sotomayor on the bench or a health care reform package with a strong public option or an America that energy independent and sustainable.

Sonia Sotomayor would be strong advocate for working Americans on the bench. Over the next 10 years the bulk of the supreme court cases will be direct confrontations that will define the labor-capital relationship in this country, especially if we continue to push for reforms in banking and securities and initiative like the Employee Free Choice Acts. These cases aren't hot buttons like abortion or gay marriage, but they have a greater importance in many ways. These legal battles to come between labor and capital are life and death to the Cheap Labor Conservatives because they want to maintain the judicial activism in the name of organized money power that they have with the Roberts-Thomas axis on the court now. They do not want that power relationship changed at any cost. The judicial branch is their only trump card right now. They want to sell Sonia Sotomayor as "the anti-white Latina" when the real of it is this isn't about brown or white. The big color in this conflict is GREEN.

Health Care Reform is a no-brainer for us working folks, especially when you can have a real choice. The Cheap Labor Conservative always crows about "CHOICE". "YOU GOTTA HAVE A CHOICE. REAL FREE ENTERPRISE DEPENDS ON CHOICE".
The trick is, choice depends on the freedom to choose. In the system we have now, what freedom to choose do you have? You have the freedom to choose the choices your HMO, PPO or EIEIO we give you and those choices are dwindling as you copayments are growing. And if you dont meet certain criterion, you don't get any choices.

The public option is the ultimate choice. Keep what you have now, or you can get what Congress gets. That's the choice the Cheap Labor Conservative doesn't want you to have, because its one less way working people can be controlled. If health care costs mount on businesses, what will organized money do? They'll pare down workers. They'll close plants. They'll ship more jobs to any place where they don't have to pay a living wage or provide protections for their workers. They will force you submit to their power just to put bread on the table, and that loaf of bread will be smaller and harder to buy.

Its the weird paradox of the Cheap Labor Conservative. They opine loudly on "Big Government" yet, they are setting up a Big Government to aid unchecked capital astride unprotected labor. If you get a strong public option, who wins? who loses? Big pharma loses. Health Insurance rackets lose. Granted they will be some who stay with what they have, but compared to a competitive Medicare With Muscles? I'd ditch my health plan yesterday and a lot of Americans would. Put this around a package of increased real research into disease and a national initiatives for wellness and fitness and what you'd have is a healtier, saner more productive nation. That is some the CLCs see as blasphemy.

Cap-and-trade and clean energy investment is a no-brainer for working people. A push to clean energy would be a 21st Century New Deal. That's a scientific and economic boom just waiting to happen. You have a potential to have more work than people to fill the jobs. Got downsized from building cars? Okay. We need people who can build hybrid buses, high speed trains, install solar panels and retrofit energy systems and those jobs would come cheap. They will be competitive, growing with living wages. America needs to get factories working again. Innovating again. "Made In The USA" needs to mean something again and this is a key way we can see that. Again, an America for this century that forward moving and fully employed.

The CLCs hate clean energy, because depressing your wages, but inflating energy costs? Just another way they ride down on the worker. Pay more to get to work and then pay less when you get to work. Keeps the profit margins high. Never mind that good wages and productivity does more for sustained growth and profit margins than all the Wall Street shell games you can think of.

But all this is the boogieman for the CLCs, the real boogieman behind the curtain for them. A new paradigm for this country strikes at the heart of their cynical push to maintain the shards of power they have left. They are trying to sell their coalition of the willing on the concept that this change means our nation loses, when the real facts are if we don't go in a new direction the nation loses.

This is what I believe we as progressive need to keep in mind and need to aggressively push as we move ahead. One thing I know, and deep down the Cheap Labor Conservative know too, the Coalition Of The Willing are looking at their pay stubs, their copayments and looking at the layoff lists and they are becoming less willing every day. And that scares the Cheap Labor Conservatives to death.