I wish our party would engage in more class warfare. I wish the rank and file around the country wanting Obama to succeed would engage in more class warfare. I wish we'd stop ceding the territory to the Republicans. It's bizarre - when I see the Democrats, and supposedly left leaning commentators shying away from it I feel like I am taking crazy pills. It's a poker-bluff when the Republicans tell us they have a stronger hand if the Dem's raise the ante and come in all class warfare. They aren't going to go all-in over this. They know deep down it's a total loser.
Class warfare? I got your class warfare right here...
Rightist commentators always like to throw out Class Warfare as a pejorative at any attempt by the forces of reason to shape economic policy. Then, as has been well documented elsewhere repeatedly they tend to support the most blatant of class warfare outrages from the one class that consistently seems to win any class warfare being raged - the one getting substantially richer at an increasing rate.
And there's a lot of that in the Republican attempts to derail the stimulus bill - their non-stop aggressive class warfare against the working class in this country. Unfortunately most Democrats just recoil at any prospect of fighting the other side of the Class Warfare struggle to the one for which the Republicans are fighting.
I definitely subscribe to the historical view that a significant part of FDR's success is attributable to the fact that the wealth elites truly believed in the very real potential for revolution, particularly in such geopolitically unstable times.
So, I genuinely hope this salary cap issue and its inevitable overwhelming popularity, in spite of a strong rearguard action by the institutionalized right wing mainstream media, might wake them up.
But we have to get there first.
I really think that the best way to change the tone in Washington, to help Obama find a consensus for desperately needed change in this country among the inertial mass of governing elites so resistant to anything that might look like it could actually produce genuine change, is to make the people who fund the Washington machine and who benefit from it understand quite how grave the situation is. Not how grave a situation the economy really is for the vast majority of Americans - that is never enough to prompt action that could impact the status quo. No, make them understand how grave the situation is for their interests, and how if the class warfare they've been waging for decades continues there's a real chance of the momentum shifting quickly and decisively, and they might not benefit so much from what might be coming.
So, good for the wonderful senator from Missouri. Good for those in congress who are making arguments that are being, or have been, tarred with brush of the class warfare label. But class warfare needs people to be making these arguments in every day in every context - that means you. That means a bubbling feeling in this country that change must come, vocalized in every venue at every opportunity. Visibly. Such that it cannot be dismissed.
To change the tone to a more civil one in Washington focused on achieving real and necessary change I think we need to be a little less civil outside of Washington. Raising issues and positions that one just doesn't raise in polite company at the moment. Showing a little more fight.
Me, I come from the rabble-rousing intellectual elite - so come the revolution I'll be first against the wall, let's face it - one side or the other always goes after us at the outset. And honestly, there are certainly elements of the rump of remaining republicans that could be characterized as representing the Rouge states - not Rouge as in just saying red states in French for fun, Rouge as in Khmer Rouge - as in their willingness to eliminate the learned portions of the middle class... but I digress.
The point is I think we all have an interest in preventing a more literal disintegration of our society, which I think is absolutely a realistic outcome as the effect of the combined challenges hitting America right now, and perhaps the best way to do that, and the best way to help Obama is to make sure we speak up for the side in any class warfare that always seems to be losing right now. If members of the varying elites don't feel that this voice is serious and how very very serious and switched on a very very large portion of this population is right now they might continue to think that they can blather their way into tinkering at the edges of the current way things are done and not making the radical sweeping changes this country needs to see very quickly.
In case I have been too vague, by radical necessary change, I mean specifically:
- addressing fundamental problems with not properly regulating capital markets and the underlying problems of the fractional reserve banking system
- addressing the need to dramatically cut energy usage and prepare for the terrifying consequences of having passed the peak of oil production in an environment of increased resource depletion
- addressing climate change issues; addressing what we've done to our economy and the effects of inadequate legal structures to prevent the Walmartization of our society
- addressing the de-skilling of the workforce and the increase in the size of the underclass of under-employed people
- addressing the arbitrary enforcement of laws in different ways for the rich than for the poor
- addressing the shocking injustices of the policing and incarceration system in this country
...and recognizing that the idea of a "fair day's wage for a far day's labour" as a fundamental right is something that we've lost to our detriment... and that it should be an absolute and that you shouldn't have to work every day of your life to guarantee it.
The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness should not mean a life lived with little in it but working till death, largely to the benefit of the various elites, with little opportunity to experience the joys of life because of exploitation, because of a lack of a safety net against the random ways society's downsides tend to get scattered around, and because the government is stacked to the gills with people more worried about social niceties of their insular social circuit, and the peer pressure they feel to reject anything that rightists label as class warfare, than they are about the well being of the three hundred million people whose interests they are paid to represent.
If no-one around you understands
Start your own revolution
And cut out the middle man
--Billy Bragg