Crisis Capitalism seems to work in only one direction. Right wing politicians have been quite promiscuous in their citations of social and economic alerts. Terrorism. Marriage. National debt. Public education. Social Security. Medicare. Poor people with microwaves. Union workers getting fat at the tax-funded trough. We walk in media-smudged funhouse mirrors of constant crisis. And Paul Ryan, as House Budget Director, has been one of our most insistent Crisis Town Criers. Indeed, he's banking his political future on his self-appointed role. The canary owns the coal mine.
So if we are indeed locked in soul crushing exigency, why doesn't our own concern get Ryan's attention? After all, he is among the ones who have introduced panic into the body politic. If we dance to the insistence of the rude blare of economic doom, is it not legitimate for us to claim audience with our elected orchestrators?
Today, activists in Wisconsin staged protests at all of Ryan's statewide offices. They re-entered Ryan's Kenosha office, where they were kicked out yesterday, and continued to seek contact with our Missing In Action Representative. The police arrived at Kenosha but didn't arrest anyone. However, they did come with a detective and a video camera. They are videotaping citizens who are seeking audience with a democratically elected official. Does this sound like banana republic intimidation to you?
Of course, just as crisis harvesting can work in two directions, so can the state of State surveillance. While we should never ignore the extreme asymmetry of power, we also shouldn't back down from our rights to control our own systems of representation, dissemination and discourse. Our very voice depends on it.
Ryan, ever the keen entrepreneur, is charging a $15 fee for his constituents to attend his only public appearances. $15 is a lot of money to hear old iterations of set speeches. Citizens United teaches us that corporations are people, and money is speech. Nowhere is this more apparent than on Representative Ryan's home beat.
So let's hear it for the folks in Racine, Kenosha, and Janesville. They are the plain folks of Wisconsin, many of them underemployed or unemployed. They deserve a chance to be heard, and the are engaging peaceful collective action in order to gain even a minor bit of political bandwidth.
See and read more about the continuing struggle to communicate with Representative Ryan at Wisconsin Jobs Now's website.