The large demonstrations at the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin are driven by a middle class awakening to the specter of its destruction by the corporate reactionaries and their toady Governor Scott Walker.
For years the middle class has watched the plutocrats stomp on the poor while listening to the two parties regale the great middle class, but never mentioning the tens of millions of poor Americans. And for years, the middle class was shrinking due significantly to corporate globalization shipping good-paying jobs overseas to repressive dictatorships like China. It took Governor Walker's legislative proposal to do away with most collective bargaining rights for most public employee unions to jolt people to hit the streets.
Republicans take rigged elections awash in corporatist campaign cash seriously. When they win, they aggressively move their corporate agenda, unlike the wishy-washy Democrats who flutter weakly after a victory. Republicans mean business. A ram rod wins against a straw all the time.
Governor Walker won his election, along with other Republicans in Wisconsin, on mass-media driven Tea Party rhetoric. His platform was deceitful enough to get the endorsement of the police, and firefighters unions, which the latter have now indignantly withdrawn.
These unions should have known better. The Walker Republicans were following the Reagan playbook. The air traffic controllers union endorsed Reagan in 1980. The next year he fired 12,000 of them during a labor dispute. (This made flying unnecessarily dangerous.)
Then Reagan pushed for tax cuts—primarily for the wealthy—which led to larger deficits to turn the screws on programs benefiting the people. Reagan, though years earlier opposed to corporate welfare, not only maintained these taxpayer subsidies but created a government deficit, over eight years, that was double that of all the accumulated deficits from George Washington to Jimmy Carter.
Maybe the unions that endorsed Walker will soon realize that not even being a “Reagan Democrat” will save them from being losers under the boot of the corporate supremacists.
The rumble of the people in Madison illustrates the following:
1. There is an ideological plan driving these corporatists. They create “useful crisis” and then hammer the unorganized people to benefit the wealthy classes. Governor Walker last year gave $140 million in tax breaks to corporations. This fiscal year's deficit is $137 million. Note this oft-repeated dynamic. President Obama caved to the Minority party Republicans in Congress last December by going along with the deficit-deepening extension of the huge dollar volume tax cuts for the rich. Now the Republicans want drastic cuts in programs that help the poor.
2. Whatever non-union or private union workers, who are giving ground or losing jobs, think of the sometimes better pay and benefits of unionized public employees, they need to close ranks without giving up their opposition to government waste. For corporate lobbyists and their corporate governments are going after all collective bargaining rights for all workers and they want to further weaken The National Labor Relations Board.
3. Whenever corporations and government want to cut workers' incomes, the corporate tax abatements, bloated contracts, handouts and bailouts should be pulled into the public debate. What should go first?
4. For the public university students in these rallies, they might ponder their own tuition bills and high interest loans, compared to students in Western Europe, and question why they have to bear the burden of massive corporate welfare payouts—food stamps for the rich. What should go first?
5. The bigger picture should be part of the more localized dispute. Governor Walker also wants weaker safety and environmental regulations, bargain-basement sell-outs of state public power plants and other taxpayer assets.
6. The mega-billionaire Koch brothers are in the news. They are bankrolling politicians and rump advocacy groups and funding media campaigns in Wisconsin and all over the country. Koch Industries designs and builds facilities for the natural gas industry. Neither the company nor the brothers like the publicity they deserve to get every time their role is exposed. Always put the spotlight on the backroom boys.
7. Focusing on the larger struggle between the people and the plutocracy should be part and parcel of every march, demonstration or any other kind of mass mobilization. The signs at the Madison rallies make the point, to wit— “two-thirds of Wisconsin Corporations Pay No Taxes,” “Why Should Public Workers Pay For Wall Street's Mess?,” “Corporate Greed Did the Deed.”
8. Look how little energy it took for these tens of thousands of people to sound the national alarm for hard-pressed Americans. Just showing up is democracy's barn raiser. This should persuade people that a big start for a better America can begin with a little effort and a well-attended rally. Imagine what even more civic energy could produce!
Showing up lets people feel their potential power to subordinate corporatism to the sovereignty of the people. After all, the Constitution's preamble begins with “We the People,” not “We the Corporations.” In fact, the founders never put the word “corporation” or “company” in our constitution which was designed for real people.
As for Governor Walker's projected two-year $3.6 billion deficit, read what Jon Peacock of the respected nonprofit Wisconsin Budget Project writes at: www.wisconsinbudgetproject.org about how to handle the state budget without adopting the draconian measures now before the legislature.
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Ralph Nader is the founder of the Center for Study of Responsive Law, in Washington.
The obscene bonuses of hedge fund managers and media elites sure don’t make things any easier. But we face a far harder reality. This reality began in 1946 and has caught up to us today. I can provide a personal chronicle, as can millions of others.
In 1946 the US was more deeply in debt than at any time since the Civil War. But all was not lost, in fact all opportunity lay ahead. Because the entire rest of the world, plus or minus, lay in smoking ruins. My father (Martin Becker) made a voyage to Europe as Purser on the SS Rachel Rivera carrying a cargo of PREGNANT BROOD MARES. Europe had no horse. Japan, China, Korea, Eurasia, they all could produce nothing nor feed themselves. So the returning veterans, survivors of the Great Depression and WWII, rolled up their sleeves and made the US supernaturally prosperous.
No nation had ever been so prosperous, and it might be that no nation will be again for a long time. But by 1970, the rest of the world was rebuilt. We began to see “foreign cars” on US roads, and Japanese TVs and radios began to appear. We no longer had uncontested prosperity. From 1970-1980, we refused to acknowledge this change, mired in Viet Nam and the aftermath, and stumbled through that decade unaware that our world had shifted.
In 1980 it was obvious, we could no longer earn the prosperity we felt entitled to. So we began borrowing. And we borrowed, and borrowed, and borrowed. In less than 20 years, things were becoming bleak, so we built a “Dot Com Internet Bubble” and convinced ourselves we could remain prosperous without actually working at it. When that blew up, it took the supernatural prosperity of post-War America with it. Since then it’s been one foolish move after another, trying to maintain a prosperity that is simply unreasonably, unsustainable, and for which we are neither willing nor able to sacrifice.
Unions can do absolutely nothing about this lack of wealth creation. The all-aboard gravy train of post-War America is over. We have a choice, get used to it, or do something about it. What we grew up with is not the norm. The historic norm as a tiny group of grossly wealthy, a slice of prosperous professionals and businesspeople, and a large group of poor. If we want to change that, we better put our thinking caps on and figure out how to compete with hungrier, more cohesive, more disciplined, more self-sacrificing cultures in China, India, and other developing nations.
Europe offers no solutions, they are sunk (and they’re beginning to realize it, eg; 25% across the board budget cuts, raising retirement age, balanced budget amendments, banning of the burqa and minarets, the end of multiculturalism, all signs of a civilization ‘manning the barricades’ in a last ditch self-defense).
The one hopeful concept here is that, if anyone can do this, it’s us. We are Americans. When we pull together, we can tilt the universe to our will.