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photo: Rigmarole via Flickr
Fear has been defeated — in Egypt, apparently. But Republicans are still trying to make Americans very afraid — afraid of scary brown people, afraid of those “liberal” Democrats, afraid of President Obama, afraid of Socialism, afraid of unemployment, afraid of those scary Moslems, and afraid of a host of other bogeymen that Republicans conjure up. And in November, 2010, they apparently succeeded in scaring the bejeesus out of the “mature” population that votes in off-year elections. In fact, what the Republicans fear is the loss of fear.
The elections in 2012 may be decided by whether or not the American people are still afraid — or whether Obama can convey a sense of optimism and hope that he brewed in 2008.
Republicans like Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin are trying to make us afraid of unions — especially unions of public employees. In Republican eyes, they’ve got three strikes against them: First, they’re union. Second, they work for the government. Third, and worst of all, most of them are Democrats! That’s why they won’t let Obama form a Works Projects/Progress Administration (WPA) like Roosevelt used to beat the Depression. But Walker and his Tea Party buddies made a miscalculation, and in Wisconsin, his union-busting proposals have driven the Youth and Labor into each others arms. This may be the thing that will energize the under-30 demographic and get them involved, and Walker is handing this gift to Obama on a silver platter. The stakes are enormous.
25 Comments
i do hope the energy continues. The grassroots can be powerful … the stakes are high.
Nice post Bob. Had a semi-heated discussion on FB with a friend who is against unions, etc., she actually said she’d be happy if the ponzi scheme, social security, would be eliminated and that teachers don’t need pensions….I know her financial situation and really had to bite my tongue to not ask how in the world she and her husband will live without SS, pension, Medicare, etc., in just a few years…they have no money. Go figure…people are drunk on anger and flailing in all of the wrong directions. She is a normally wonderful person.
The majority of workers have no retirement plan in place, an unfortunate result of the security given us by SS, Medicare and the related social supports. Taking them away seems to the deluded right wing like a punishment to others but not themselves. I do not wish to see them end up as they wish on those others, but that’s what they’re working toward.
We will soon see entire families living together, until each one dies. There will be no help from anyone but family. Children will stay with their parents, who will stay with their parents. Much like 3rd world countries do. Grandpa will be propped up in the corner, as the only option, and will get little medical or retirement help. That’s what politicians all want, and that is what is happening. Grassroots? Isn’t happening until it’s too late. A union fighting for gov’t worker’s rights, isn’t about to help anyone but themselves, as they have turned into political machines. Do you hear any of these protesters in WI discussing any worker’s rights except their own? Nope. Have you heard their unions battling on behalf of the American working in the past 30 years, as private sector jobs have been outsourced and dismantled? Nope. Self preservation is a sign of failure not a grassroots campaign. Stick a fork in them. They are done. Walker could come out today publicly and say they are all fired. What are they going to do? Protest? So? It won’t do anything. Even Reagan figured out unions don’t give a sh*t about their members.
“Do you hear any of these protesters in WI discussing any worker’s rights except their own? Nope.”
You are quite wrong about this. I was in Madison, in a hotel on Capitol Square, this past weekend. I’ve heard the protesters say that they are protesting on behalf of ALL workers. Union workers were at the forefront of getting what we expect today as a normal work environment for *all* workers.
What we see today is truly a class war, fomented by rich patrons such as the Koch brothers, who financed Walker’s campaign, against the working class, which has already taken it in the teeth by the current deep recession. Which side are you on, brother, which side are you on?
Bob in AZ
Your right where the push to move the min. wage to a liveable wage and where the push to tax good sent to this nation for the security that jobs gave us in the 1960 and 1970.
Where were these unions the last 30 years as my family lost their jobs and income, and have had to settle with way less than we had in the 70s? Nowhere. No, sorry Bob, I believe these unions are just as greedy as the gov’t they pretend to fight. Did you know (just for some trivia) that if you work for Ontario Hydro and are layed off, you HAVE TO STILL pay your yearly union dues, or you do not get recalled. Unions are now working hand in hand with politicians. These public sector workers do not deserve to get any preferential treatment, that has not been given to the private workers. Sorry, but if unions can’t help everyone, then they can go the way of the political hacks their leadership supports. WI elected Walker. Good luck.
“Where were these unions the last 30 years as my family lost their jobs and income, and have had to settle with way less than we had in the 70s? Nowhere.”
So, you define fighting for jobs and income as “greedy”? You are self-contradicting. You abhor the very fights that would have prevented your family’s losses, and then blame unions for being greedy. I think you have your own issues to resolve.
Bob in AZ
“people are drunk on anger”
Beautiful phrase, and right on target. These people are going through stages of grief as they watch their country go down the drain.
It’s something too many of my nerd-liberal friends just don’t get. Or else, they blame the DFH for making people mad at them.
You know, CB you are so full of shit at times I wonder if you aren’t a savvy troll. Where do find this tripe? Do you have any understanding of how unions work, or are you getting all your info from the National Post?
Are do you just want to be a working class hero, ‘something to be.’
It’s either the Tubby Black Post or Maclean’s from whence he’s getting his idears, I reckon.
I think in one particularly bizarre way, he’s kind of useful; he illustrates quite clearly that defeatism helps entrenched conservatives more than anyone else.
This is obviously an economic war and until Tahrir Square and Madison, WI, only the elites were waging it. Good to see that a few more people are fighting back at having their livelihoods and well-being are being stripped from them by the political lobbying of their corporate employers. Remember an earlier bit of propaganda I haven’t seen much of recently?: “Employees are our most important asset.”
Oh, so we’re to believe that the Republicans are responsible for Obama’s failure to enact a new WPA? Please, you are delusional. There is only one party, the Money Party, with two wings, it’s time for us to give up our belief that the national Democratic Party has any interest in doing anything other than fellating the oligarchs in the legalized bribery scam that is our government.
“fellating the oligarchs in the legalized bribery scam that is our government”
Well put.
Perhaps there is only one thing worse than fear, and that is apathy. So, tehcatlady and others of similar mindset, what do you propose to do?
Bob in AZ
It constantly strikes me that all of these politicians that are constantly ratcheting up the fear are public employees, and yet voting for their own pay raises, accepting pensions, health care, and yes even social security is perfectly o.k., it’s just not o.k. for these other “overpaid” public employees that are not politicians, but actually have to work for a living.
Sorry but what these people are doing, whether they be congresscritters or governors, or whatever, I can no longer consider to be work, it’s simply plotting and creating conspiracies to look after their buddies, the corporations and rich people, while righteously looking down on anybody who has not achieved their level of wealth, believing that somehow they have not worked hard enough.
John Pilger, Truthout: “The revolt in the Arab world is not merely against a resident dictator, but against a worldwide economic tyranny designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries like Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with half the population earning less than $2 a day. The people’s triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism.”
What happens when the people of Egypt learn who their new overlords are? Will they still have no fear? Or will they succumb to the tyranny that has been created for them… and for us? For is not the immunity of the Banksters and their stranglehold on our economy of a piece with what Pilger describes above?
And how much do you wanna bet that the Koch brothers who funded Walker’s campaign are in league with those Banksters, as suggested by tehcatlady?
Bob in AZ
One little point to answer “where were the unions…etc.” – For too many of us, and especially before internet new outlets like this one, if the MSM didn’t cover it, it didn’t happen.
Public employees have been giving up benefits and salary for years, in negotiation(!), partly out of fear of the demonization going on for 3 or 4 decades. But it didn’t make your newspaper, so you didn’t know about it.
Once in awhile some local news station might show a snippet of workers (of any union) walking a picket line, but it never went any farther.
Just ’cause you didn’t see it on tv or in the news doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening.
Bob…
I enjoyed your diary and I sincerely thank you for it…But!
I am definitely fearful for my children and my 3 grandchildren, because I see a dark and foreboding future for them because of the idiot asswipes we have in all of the political spectrum as well as the bastard elitists who want to make a large portion of the citizenry grovel at their side for table scraps.
We do not have a 2 party system…we have the party of corporate puppeteering and the MOTU who control the entire farce with the useless puppets like Obama and almost all of the RePukes. The game is purposely rigged and we all should know it.
As for being apathetic, I for one can assure you that my emotional and deeply felt convictions as to where this empire is headed is neither faded, jaded, or diminished by what these asswad idiots in DC and elsewhere are doing.
They are explicitly preparing the downtrodden, fearful, apprehensive, and just simply poor and miserable legions of neighbors, family, the country’s citizens; who are the aged, middleclass, poverty class and everything in-between to subject themselves to servitude, squalor, and eventual death and disease.
What does anyone propose to do?
Well for one, I suggest getting rid of this fucking illusion of a two-party system which is NOT representative of the people. It is rotten to the core and needs to be buried and stomped on.
My second proposal is to knock over the great white towers of the degenerately wealthy and blood sucking inhumans who populate the boardrooms of our corporations and and of Wall street, and all of the Oligarchy …but that requires the supposedly unholy word called ‘revolution’.
You know the elephant in the room no one wants to acknowledge…the one that the Egyptian people decided was their last recourse!
Enuf said…we do it, or we die…PERIOD!
Well, earlier this week I exercised my civic duty by going out and voting against that ‘f@#king retard’ Rahm Emmanuel in an election that had very low turnout. This Saturday I will be joining in the protest movement in support of the Wisconsin public union employees organized in my city.
What would you suggest, vigilantism?
Excellent rebuttal,Bob.
This much I know to be true, there has yet to exist a union
that has raped and robbed the American public in the fashion that the vampire squid of Wall Street have done.. and are continuing to do..with the upper echelon enablers in D.C.
THEY don’t NEED a union …why bother…we are the ones paying THEIR dues!
Here’s the problem in America. For generations people have been brainwashed from the cradle. We are so totally divided as a people between two ideologies that I cannot imagine what could unite us. The only way to defeat the oligarchy is for the people to rise as one. Can you imagine that every worker in America would heed a call for even one day of not showing up for work? There are too many even among the poor who believe the garbage about how only unbridled capitalism can be our salvation. One of my family is very proud of stating that he is a proud and poor Republican. All these teabaggers on social security and medicare railing against their own interests, and wishing to abolish their only source of income and health care. It has reached a point where many are willing to sacrifice themselves and their families to their deeply held ideology. How can we change this?
Given the events in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, is the idea of getting every worker even the right one? I’m sure that at first, everyone in all three countries didn’t support what the protesters were doing, but the events spiraled in such a way that they got more support from more people as time went on.
Perhaps that’s a more important question: how to get things to build upon each other in such a way that it supports our outcomes instead of the status quo?
I feel some of the despondency about our two-party oligarchy that seems united with the Banksters, in opposition to the working class. This is the same two-party oligarchy for which justice is far from blind, and favors the MOTU over the average bloke. Torturers and fraudsters abound without restraint, but whistle-blowers are ground to a pulp. Yes, I feel all that.
But I love the energy and idealism that Egypt brought out, and that the combination of Labor and Youth is creating in Wisconsin, and that gives me hope. I hope Rachel Maddow is right that the Right Wing effort at union-busting is failing, although I think that is far from a sure thing.
Tonight I went to a meeting of the national Progressive Democrats of America national team, on a tour through Arizona(!) arriving tonight in Flagstaff. Can you imagine? a team of progressives with a series of meetings in *Arizona*!!?? We had a pretty decent turnout, with half a dozen progressive groups tabling and a good pep talk from the national leaders of PDA as well as local leaders. It is not an exercise in futility unless we let it be. We are planting seeds, offering encouragement, and bearing witness. So I continue to have hope, along with my occasional bouts of cynicism.
Bob in AZ