“He who controls the narrative wins the Field.” Hmmm, might just be the 21st century take on The Art of War.
Behind the Republican legislative victories in state and national government is a power grab by elite corporations and mentally diseased, ultra-right-wing wealthy businessmen. State governments have become the latest toy of the ever-avarous. Having schemed for decades to destroy trade unions, populated with ordinary Americans who want effective government, living wages, the right to exist(!) and an economic and social environment in which businesses and wealthy Americans carry a fair share of the financial cost of infrastructure and equity, the elite sensed a time of union vulnerability. Forty years of deregulation, corporate welfare, tax cuts for the wealthy, i.e., supply-side economics, had left the economy hollow, teetering on collapse.
The supply-siders had a profound advantage. New generations of citizen-consumers came of age in an economic and social climate that was blindly, unthinkingly anti-union, that indulged in the bubble markets of the nineties, that left government largely to be run by ideological specialists, narcissists, sociopaths (and in Boehner, one notable alcoholic). These defective legislative ingrates live in social and ideological bubbles, remarkably enured, with few exceptions, to the humbling revelations inherent in foreign travel and foreign study.
Unthinking conservative Americans who voted them into office are ethnocentric, a-historical, anti-intellectual, me-first, democracy-means-laissez-faire-business-practices-equal-patriotism Americans, more consumers than citizens. Raised at the tit of cheap oil, moving about in unnatural climes increasingly proscribed by corporate avarice, these consumers are co-dependent on corporations. Expect them to spout the corporate line, believing the borrowed memes to be their own.
The very well-paid corporate strategists recommended a knockout blow: strip the nation's unions of their collective bargaining rights and they cease to threaten oligarchy. Unions would simply fade away, or be reduced to waging symbolic (and losing) battles over wages. The public is now coached to dismiss unions as toothless dinosaurs. Republican governors who railroad anti-union legislation through Republican-majority now crow that they are promoting job growth. No sane economist has found evidence to support these mad claims.
The public was certainly receptive: corporate, financial and speculatory malfeasance had caused the the Great Recession, but the public memory for this fact was shockingly short. Public anger and subsequent push for regulatory reform dissipated as more immediate and pressing concerns loomed. These concerns included the consumption of entertainment and attention to the family's financial solvency. Both took time and energy away from the need to help the country begin a return to accountability, responsibility and long-term thinking.
But the latter is not the same thing as the pretense to fiscal responsibility being foisted by the Republicans of late. Indeed, the Republican citizens' normative thinking and planning habits are overwhelmingly short-term, (even in regards to retirement planning), a perfect match with supply-side economic theory. Long-term sustainability is noticeably absent from Republican-think.
Besides, corporate chess-moves remain remote, most of them far beyond the horizons of mere wage earners. The effects are calculated to creep slowly into the lives of ordinary citizens, often going unnoticed. But consider the frog in the experiment where the water in which he floats is slowly brought to a boil. The creature alters its metabolism, adjusting itself for far too long. Only when the water has grown too hot, long past survivable, does the frog attempt to flee.
Mainstream media is “reporting” (repeating) Republican talking points with precious little analysis. It would take time (cut to commercial) and space (no room for the ad about selling your gold jewelry) and comprehension. Reporters would have to consult with tax law experts, economists, pension fund managers and political scientists, and then synthesize the mass of data.
With precious few exceptions, most politicians are looking past reporters and their questions. All they see is the next election season looming.
But Scott Walker's handlers are happy. Coaching and cash from ultra-right wing Koch-funded groups like Americans for Prosperity (prosperity for a select few, that is) and Club for Growth has helped the ideologically-blinded Republican governor and knee-jerk Republican majorities in the legislature frame the showdown as one between greedy unions and "fiscally responsible" Republicans.
Walker and the Republican legislators are just the morally-pliable, or morally vacuous, kinds of "legislators” that wealthy and corporate America want. Cut short a public hearing after right-to-work proponents have had their say, but before the right-to-work opponents get in a single word of rebuttal. Democracy? Not by a longshot. Republiscum staining representative government and selling out to the one-percent fringe? Yup.
Your neighbors, who work in non-union environments, and who know that you work in a union shop, put out feelers to see how you view this economic and social crisis. What do you tell them?
What follows is part one of an argument. It is not the blueprint for any screaming match with an agitated, ill-informed neighbor. That advances nothing and stalls insight, reflection, and collaborative change. And the United States must change: it change course economically, socially, legally. Trickle-down economics has had decades to prove itself a failure. And it has succeeded monumentally in that failure.
Now we must describe, advertise and condemn the tilted economic playing field that corporate America has graded and seeded in the past forty-odd years. We must recall the history of organized labor and restore it to its place alongside organized business in this democratic republic.
Share the information that follows with your well-meaning but fear-driven neighbors. Some of them paint the world in apocalyptic colors.
So the first false premise to attack is that unions are greedy. Saturday is the perfect day to have an over-the-fence discussion on this fallacy. Since your neighbor may say one thing among his friends who work in non-union businesses, and yet he has a modicum of empathy in your presence, he or she is curious about how unionized workers think. What a perfect time to ask your neighbor why he is not at work.
The conception of Saturday as a day off from work is recent, as is the 8 hour work day and forty hour work week. Until the late 1930s, a six day, 10 hour-a-day work week was more the norm for the blue collar worker. Unions battled with greedy managers and businessmen for the worker's right to have a life outside of work, a rather obvious recognition (to all but the morally degenerate) that humans do not exist to be dehumanized cogs in a giant corporate combine. We work to live. We do not live to work. The latter is reserved for those with social and moral deficits. Such defects are not to be admired, but dealt with in therapy.
Workplace safety standards could be construed as greedy, if you think a worker's right to keep all of his limbs is an unreasonable constraint on corporate productivity. Unions won many battles with the-bottom-line-is-all-that-matters management drones and money-mad businessmen over working conditions, and safety features now taken as commonplace and logical were once only dreams. We realize more fully now that if an injured worker is no longer efficient and is fired, the loss of income devastates him, but also his family. They become a drain on private and public charity and adversely affect the producers and retailers who sold goods to the worker and his family.
Workmens' compensation, rehabilitation and retraining were haphazard to nonexistent until mid-century, and only became normative when the productivity and well-being of the worker was recognized as a component of the well-being of the economy and the nation, not merely the company.
To put unions squarely back in the mainstream of American life, remind your neighbor about the “Miracle on the Hudson,” the US Airways Airbus A320 passenger liner that lost power to both engines shortly after takeoff and made an emergency landing in the Hudson River. All of the 155 people aboard survived. The cool-as-a-cucumber pilot and co-pilot followed established procedures to try and restart the engines, and when those steps failed, followed established procedures to properly land the plane, upright and intact, on the river.
Those pilots belonged to a union, the Airline Pilots Association.
The cabin crew, who followed established, rehearsed evacuation procedures, and manifested calm efficiency to worried passengers, also belong to a union, the Association of Flight Attendants.
The Air Traffic Controllers, who followed established, rehearsed emergency procedures and thus could quickly allocate flight corridors, re-route other air traffic and offer landing options, belong to a union, the National Air traffic Controllers Association.
The crew aboard the ferry boats that plucked the passengers from the wings and life rafts were trained and rehearsed in established water rescue procedures, and belong to the Seafarers International Union.
Management, concerned with profit and loss in free-market competition, pays little attention to “external costs” such as safety and pollution, until disaster and loss of life and limb make it bad public relations to ignore the worker and the consumer. Witness the spate of mine-tunnel explosions, mine-tunnel collapses, and the resulting injuries and deaths among miners worldwide. Strong unions alert the public and the government to work-related dangers and push for safety-first working conditions and effective oversight and regulation.
Corporatania, a provincial mind-set unto itself, blasts these changes as job-killing and impossible to implement because they nibble at profit margins. (Stop hyperventilating Big-Money, you're catastrophizing.) But in supply-side economics, the absence of these reforms eliminates lives. More importantly (This will make the bean counters' and CFOs' ears perk up, providing they want to hear it.), operating without safety equipment and procedures costs the corporation more than having them in place and functional.
Let's ask BP, in the wake of the Gulf Oil Spill Disaster, to weigh the cost of multiple and redundant blow-out prevention technology, properly maintained and regularly tested, against the cost of cleanup operations. And let's assign a value to the marine life and shoreline species. BP insists these are not quantifiable and should not even be footnoted. While we're at it, what cost to the gulf economy did the spill incur?
Corporate lapdogs argue that unions have done what needed to be done to secure workers' rights and safety, but now their time has passed and they are no longer needed.
This statement is never made by a union member, someone who has been on the receiving end of management guile. Such ridiculous assertions come from a management fox who insists he is perfectly trustworthy and will guard the hen house with his life.
The untruth is evident when you examine Maternity Leave, Paternity Leave, and associated Parental Leave. The U.S. is the only industrialized nation that offers no national paid leave benefit. Ten weeks was the norm for shared Parental Leave in Canada (“shared” meaning the mother might take, say, seven weeks, and the father would take the balance, three) but his was recently raised to 35 weeks. American parents will be astonished to know that this Canadian Parental Leave is in addition to 15 weeks of Maternity Leave.
European nations, too, also show greater awareness of the benefit to productivity that is associated with respecting workers' rights to a life outside of work. France offers 16 weeks at 100% pay for the first child, Denmark and Lithuania offer 52 weeks, Norway 56 weeks, Sweden even more.
Even impoverished, relatively non-industrialized African nations show more long-term thinking: 14 weeks at 100% pay for the Malagasy, the citizens of Madagascar whose gross national income is $911.00 per wage earner per year.
“Ahh,” say the corporate apologists, “You said National Paid Leave Benefit! That's Socialism!” As if this label, intended disparagingly and hinting vaguely at Soviet-style governance, was clear evidence of a liberal plot to overthrow our government.
Excuse me a moment....
I'm back, though I'm still bursting into fitful laughter. Corporate apologists are such cut-ups! They did it again: they conflated the corporate welfare state we're currently stuck in with the ideals of the democratic republic we all want to live in (at least, those of us who are not avaristic, narcissistic, sociopathic oligarchs).
This calculated ploy deters true-believer Republicans and more moderate Republican-leaning citizens from looking at the Social-Democratic forms of governance common in Europe. To see how these nations soar above the U.S. requires that sober American citizens swallow monumental amounts of pride (the kind with nationalist overtones). “America-First!” egos also have to be deflated (That exclamation, by the way, is usually accompanied by a raised fist and can look remarkably socialist.) and have to see the production efficiencies inherent in respecting, rather than merely exploiting, a labor force.
Corporate lobbyists have diverted monumental sums to their own bank accounts lobbying against Maternity and Paternity leave, and obfuscate the production efficiencies of adopting these types of leave. But why? Why would corporate America work against its own best interests? And what does this have to do with the Corporate-underwriting of the Republican attack against unions. How, in short, does any of this enter into my over-the-fence chat with that neighbor?
This essay concludes in the next diary. Here's a teaser:
The monied class believe themselves blessed, special. To quote the Pig in George Orwell's Animal Farm, “All animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”