Scorpions

[mqbush]

“An economic democracy is a precondition of a political democracy.” (Dennis Kucinich, speaking in Wisconsin)

Conservatives might tend to take that comment as condescending paternalism by a liberal, or worse, a proselytizing for some kind of socialism. But when the SCOTUS can give vast corporations so much electoral clout while Republican state legislatures (such as in Tennessee) propose bills barring union contributions to candidates, it’s no longer reasonable to say that workers have a fair chance to effect beneficial change at the ballot box.

Workers are now forced to take to the streets. They have to gather signatures to recall legislators. They are anything but the passive and soft dregs of a welfare state. They are anything but deeply conservative, no matter how much we’re told they are. They are anything but represented in proportion to their numbers. When the CEO of GE essentially gets a million or so votes for his political choices, through his influence and the power of his money, and the worker gets one vote- providing there’s not a half-dozen new exclusionary laws barring him from even casting that one vote- then that’s not a political democracy. And it’s because there’s no economic democracy.

Would it be fair for some governor to take YOUR money, beyond taxes, to help make up budget shortfalls? No? Then it’s not fair either to take money from teachers and other public workers. It’s neither here nor there that public workers are paid with tax dollars; if it’s not fair to take YOUR money, then it’s not fair to take public workers’ money. But private sector workers are resentful because management IS taking their money to make up for what management considers an inadequate profit. Guided resentment makes the private sector attack fellow workers instead of attacking the political economy that is hurting all workers. Private sector workers see public workers as greedy parasites, lazy receivers of welfare, enemies of decent society. If private sector workers “have to” tighten their belts, then damn it so should public workers, the hurt and resentful private sector workers say.

This is the new class war: private against public. Pitting worker against worker is supposed to keep us from attacking the real enemy,-the political/financial co-dependency that pits all the power in America against the worker. This is so clear to the rest of the world that Wisconsin protestors received moral support –and support in the form of pizza- from individuals and groups around the world, from every continent, including Antarctica. As America goes, so goes- to some extent- the rest of the world, and the world doesn’t want America to return to the Gilded Age of de facto rule by the wealthy and grinding poverty for the masses.

President Truman said “Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, ‘socialism.’” Though he said this over half a century ago, it still appears to be at least as true now as then. Eisenhower’s monumental use of the most progressive tax rates we’ve ever seen to build the Interstate Highway System showed that he knew the power of positive socialized spending to profoundly improve the country, but the only recognition of this from his fellow Republicans was accusations of communist ties. It took Democrats to see to it that widows and orphans were not thrown out to the streets, for which they were called socialists. It took Democrats to try, over the past half century, to assure that sickness or accident doesn’t get people thrown out to the streets, for which they are called socialists.

It’s not GDP or the bottom line that makes for a good life. The measure of the success of civilization’s development is the achievement of a life for the masses of useful work enjoyed in the freedom from worry about one’s life being at the whim of charity when old age or illness strikes. Those creations that ease us from constant worry over the unavoidable are hysterically maligned as a socialist pox destroying America, and that’s an absurdity that has to stop. It’s only the wealthy who have a genuine reason to badmouth anything remotely socialist. They have the resources to saturate this country with hysterical dread of anything that eases the lives of the masses, and they’ve been hard at it these past several decades.

It’s the market that constrains us unless government advocates for us. It’s not government that tells us to go into the mines that are clearly unsafe. It’s not the government that drops employee medical insurance, or outsources our jobs. Government could provide jobs, if we didn’t blast it for doing so. It’s not the agencies in government that come up with policies that hurt us; it’s the elected politicians dependent on lobbyist bribes that do this. Government as a whole is not our enemy. It’s because government can be our advocate that it has to be undermined by private power and made an object of ridicule and disdain in the public mind.

We've been like scorpions in a box being shaken into a frenzy of attacking our fellows instead of getting out of the box to sting the tormentor that turns us against each other.