Compare these reactions to the #FightFor15 campaign.
Today, when Capitol workers left their jobs in a strike over wages, a member of Congress literally came out of his office, stood and addressed them. That was Bernie Sanders. He’s a Socialist. His noble gesture of solidarity is a reflection of the principles of socialism, and it’s a gesture that, with a few more like it, could engender him to many, many more who are just pining for a presidential candidate who has the audacity to literally stand with and for the 99%.
We largely don’t know anything about socialism in the United States, I think for a couple of reasons. One is that the American education system, hawked over and essentially controlled by the oligarchs whose money rules all elections, has been on a relentless campaign to denigrate and malign the only economic system whose ultimate aim is to dignify all citizens through a principled commitment to egalitarianism, shared prosperity and workers rights.
Instead, capitalism = democracy is the ingrained lie we’ve been sold. The other reason is more recent poisonous effects of the influence of those massive organs of RW propaganda on tv and radio, which wave the flag and praise Jesus together, and is echoed in the pulpit, to make this falsest of equations. Many Christians here sadly gobble down this tripe, and make the most perverse conflation that Jesus was a capitalist.
I'm not sure what Baldwin knows about socialism but I do know he surely didn’t like being stuck in traffic because of a socialist march. Last week while thousands of people, myself and some friends included, marched through NYC, after a rally attended by and hosting politicians such as Eric Shneiderman, Scott Stringer and Latisha James, Baldwin showed some of his true neoliberal colors as he tweeted away about his own inconvenience. An op-ed in the NY Times confronted it, “A Response to Alec Baldwin’s Complaints That a Living Wage Rally Snarled Traffic.”
“Life in NY is hard enough as is. The goal is to not make it more so. How does clogging rush hour traffic from 59th St to 42 do any good?”
“Oh, I support their cause. The timing of their event wasn’t what good NYers would do....”
“ NY’s ethos dissolves every day that individuals or groups put their needs/goals ahead of everyone else’s.”
“There are ways to rally people to your cause without inconveniencing an entire City.”
Has this guy ever got behind the wheel to drive to a Jets game in the early fall when there are street fairs all over NYC, clogging traffic everywhere?
His clueless and privileged point of view reminded me of Bloomberg’s out-of-touch Marie Antionette-esque responses to Occupy Wall St.
Back to the Op-ed:
The convenience factor! Now, that, Mr. Baldwin, is an issue that doesn’t get raised every day by your fellow supporters of a living wage. And it reminds me that this point rarely comes up when we consider the history of social movements in the United States: the sheer inconvenience that peaceful protests create for people who are not protesting.
Just think back to the recent coverage of the 50th anniversary of the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala.
I watched some of that on television and not a single correspondent that I saw posed the pointed question: What kinds of traffic disruptions did those civil rights activists cause when they tried to cross that bridge?
O.K. You’re absolutely right. This letter is beginning to take on a snarky tone. (I would have loved to discuss my snarkiness with you directly, but your publicist, Jillian Taratunio, informed me that you had decided not to do any interviews about last week’s protest. But I digress.)
It’s just that sometimes, Mr. Baldwin, people do take stands to try to bring about change for the better. And sometimes their protests disrupt our day-to-day routines. Sometimes, they’re even intended to disrupt our day-to-day routines, to open our eyes, to bring attention to causes that might otherwise be ignored.
Here’s how MLK, another socialist, responded to critics who questioned his methods of direct action civil disobedience, as he wrote from the Birmingham Jail:
"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate,
• who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice;
• who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice;
• who constantly says: 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action';
• who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom;
• who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a 'more convenient season.'
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
Last week
the #FightFor15 campaign was launched in a massive global rollout , as reported by the excellent jpmassar. The movement being global, but started in the U.S., is a stark reminder that the rest of the world is not Red vs. Blue, that indeed we do share the greater world with many other culturally diverse human beings, a startling amount of which are living in degrading conditions due to relentless global neoliberalist capitalism commandeering and sucking dry so much of the world’s human and natural resources.
So, I did a search on DK for FightFor15 and came up with 4 diaries, which were mostly ignored, a bleak reminder of the narrow attention span oftentimes found here. There was also a blow by blow local reportage of a great turnout in San Diego. The former received 19 recs, and the latter 3. Of course there was also the stalwart Joe Shikspack mentioning it in his always great daily roundup Evening Blues(8pm EST), which provides much-needed sanity for many of us. Mine fared a little better, only because of the beneficence of the people who reclaim diaries for the Community Spotlight. But even there, none of the conversation was about the #FightFor15. Compare this with the appearance yesterday on the Recommended list of a half-baked, low hanging fruit diary concerned with shooting Conservative Republican fish in a barrel. It got over 300 recs, joining the club housing a seemingly infinite list of similar retreads. This continued trajectory grants the divide and conquer wishes of our corporate rulers.
Then there's the actor Baldwin, who obviously needs to familiarize himself with the writer Baldwin. Alec’s like a lot of rich people, or overworked people with children, for instance, who don’t have the time (or care to) pay attention to the reasons for this decade-long devastating downturn of socioeconomic events turning their and their kids lives upside down.
Does he have any idea how difficult it is to organize, attract and commit folks to taking off a day of work and marching through the streets, in the face of being jeered at, intimidated, beaten, or arrested? This isn’t a fucking Hollywood movie, the insult of non-livable wages is reality. Back to the NY Times op-ed:
“Oh, I support their cause. The timing of their event wasn’t what good NYers would do....”
What a relief! That message really eased my mind. I’m sure that it made Julia Andino, a single mother who works at McDonald’s, feel better, too. Maybe you saw her? She was protesting because she earns $8.75 an hour — minimum wage in New York State — and struggles to pay the rent for the single room that she shares with her 3-year-old son.
Perhaps you noticed Patricia O’Hara, a home health aide who earns $10 an hour caring for older patients and strains to pay all of her bills. Or Ashley Wiley, another McDonald’s worker, who gets paid $9.19 an hour and has to rely on Medicaid and food stamps to help support her three sons.
They were all out on Wednesday evening, marching, chanting and calling for change that might improve their lives.
"As long as I got mine, who cares about anyone else," is the unspoken ideology of the Libertarian, the Fiscal Conservative and oh yes, the Neoliberal. Oh, they’ll show up or lend support for the social issues like gay marriage, reforming marijuana laws or immigration rights, and they’ll even pay occasional lip service in public to economic reform. But when things really matter to the masses that
involve money - like having a livable wage, access to healthcare, free higher education, a pension plan not looted by Wall St, collective bargaining rights and a peace of mind financially, they'll tuck tail and run.
It's really an insight to the neoliberal mind, exposing a bit of that fraudulent "I agree with you, just as long as I'm not asked to make even the smallest sacrifice or endure the slightest inconvenience." When it comes to the economically-disenfranchised, and being asked to take a stand behind concrete plans to tackle it requiring the rich to pay more, levying heavy taxes on Wall St and to support cutting tax breaks for the wealthy, neoliberals suddenly sulk away calling for “moderation.”
How much more indignity can these wage slaves be humiliated by and forced to endure? "Walmart, McDonalds, Walgreens Cheating Hourly Workers? NY AG Investigates Use Of Prepaid Payroll Cards," and "Pregnant fast food manager fired when she wouldn’t reimburse money stolen in armed robbery."
What else can we do, when the halls of Congress are painted with bribes?
Non-violent civil disobedience on a massive scale to truly disrupt status quo should be next.
Too many lives are being churned up in the relentless grinder of unbridled capitalism.