Wisconsin and the Media

We're seeing a lot of arguments on how this wasn't "really" a defeat for unions and that the voters just don't like recalls. In 2003 when Grey Davis was recalled in California, voters liked recalls fine. Voters were told not to like recalls, over and over. They were told to be jealous of people with decent salaries and pensions, instead of trying to get them for themselves.

I think the bottom line here is that it’s nearly impossible to win against a well-run campaign propagated through a media dominated by the propagandists. All the money spent in the state was able to dominate the media.

Now, this is not news. It is how the authoritarian regimes of the 20th century operated. I think that part of having a free press is having a press that is not monopolized by a single political viewpoint. The people who wrote the post-World-War-II anti-press concentration laws knew understood this very well, having just lived through wars enabled by controlled mass-media. So, so long as there are centralized mass media, I think freedom demands regulation of media concentration.

Bring back the Fairness Doctrine! Put Noam Chomsky on Fox!

The Failure of the Left in the United States

The unions, unnoticed, have been one of the pillars of our democracy. They fund campaigns and all kinds of activism. But now, it seems, the radical right has found a way to defeat unions at the state level.

Yeah, we lost Wisconsin. If that progressive stronghold could not stand, I think only the wealthiest, most urban states will. And Oregon, for some odd reason.

For some years to come, it seems the US right wing has a winning formula. What this means...

1. More wars. The rich and powerful can't manage to pay the rest of us, but there are always enough of them who want to pay for the next war, and send some of us off to die in it.
2. Authoritarianism at home. The continued expansion of the surveillance state and the use of militarized policing within US borders.
3. Uncontrolled carbon emissions and ecological destruction, for at least another decade.
4. The continued abrogation of ancient rights of property and person.
5. A continued fall in wages.
6. A continuation of boom and bust economics that will impoverish all but some of the wealthiest.
7. The reduction, if not outright elimination, of Social Security. The privatization of Medicare. Severe cuts in Medicaid. People's grandmothers will die, along with grandfathers and children, as well as numerous disabled people. Younger people will have the hard choice of taking in and caring for disabled elderly relatives or seeing them left to charity care.

Personally, it is likely to make it hard for me to get health care. I thank you from the bottom of my heart, oh conservatives, from all its diseased arteries.

And how will it end? I expect to be an old man before I see any improvement, if it comes at all in my life. I do anticipate change as the younger generation grows to middle age and comes into power. Look to the elections of 2020, I think. But, even so, it's going to be a hard ride. Meantime, look to the alternative economy and the new craft economy. Make friends and support each other.

The wildcard, as it has been for years now, is climate change and ecological destruction.

On the defeat of labor in Wisconsin

[I'm cross-posting this in many places]

With the resounding defeat of labor in Wisconsin, we are probably going to see a return to 1880s levels of anti-labor violence. So one of the questions becomes: will a President call out the National Guard, or use the standing military, to put down strikes?

It’s hard for me to imagine that Romney would not. Obama?

Turning to the narrower effort, just what is Wisconsin going to become? Is the University going to survive? What happens when we see people fired in job lots at a whim? It is hard for me to see how violence can be avoided.

Food!

BTW, please stop calling it "right-to-work."  Call it "scab."

Croak of the Day: Jeff Sharlet

(Well, yesterday, anyway.)

"@JeffSharlet Masked men in all black, wearing strange armor, refuse to ID selves, carrying sticks cld be weapons. Turns out cops have a black bloc, too."

(After FireDogLake, link.)

Centrist Fiscal Responsibility

The center-right coalition which had governed Greece since 1975 broke apart in the last election. The conservative "socialist" (though perhaps it is best described as SINO--socialist in name only) PASOK party lost, in favor of more leftist parties, and the fascist Golden Dawn. The largest plurality in the election went, unsurprisingly, to the more conservative centrist New Democracy party, with the second largest to a left to far-left coalition, and the third to the fascists.

The loss of PASOK, and the realization that in Greece the "centrist" coalition had broken up, led me to reflecting on how similar Greek politics was to US. In the USA, it is the Democrats, the slightly further left element of the centrist coalition, who have suffered the most in the breaking of that coalition. In Greece, PASOK. In the USA, the Democrats have responded by becoming more conservative; in parliamentary Greece it is possible that PASOK will fail entirely, or at least become a marginal party.

I am struck by how the economic history of Greece under the centrists parallels the economic history of the USA under the centrists. The corruption was worse in Greece, with widespread tax evasion and over-borrowing in prosperous times. But in the USA, the financialists stole our health care and banking systems and the peacetime militarism has been huge, so it is not like the USA was corruption-free.

Centrists consistently claim to be fiscally responsible, and they lie. With their military over-spending, their over-borrowing to cover over-spending (as under Reagan and Bush II as well as in the last decade of Greek history), with their crony capitalism, with their tax-base decreasing austerity policies, they are anything but fiscally responsible. Their claims of fiscal responsibility, in entire, are delusions which much of society accepts, apparently because of the widespread belief that pain is more to be trusted than pleasure.

If you went to a doctor, came away feeling worse, and kept feeling worse, while the doctor kept claiming you were getting better, would you go back? Yet that is what centrists and austerians ask us to do. To Orwell's three slogans of the Party: "War is peace," "Freedom is slavery," "Ignorance is strength," I think I would add two more: "Poverty is wealth" and "Sickness is health."  After decades of centrist policies, and the abysmal failure of those policies, I don't see any reasons to believe at all.

A focus on debt, and debt alone, in government budgeting is fiscal irresponsibility.

Conservatism is as much in love with violence and pain as nihilist anarchism, and conservatism is far more popular.

I believe that health is health, and wealth is wealth. Much simpler that way.

On the failure of welfare reform

Dr. Jared Bernstein:

Excellent reporting in today’s NYT on whether welfare reform worked as well as almost everyone says it did. The conclusion, as we’ve stressed in lots of recent work at CBPP, is that it is at best a fair-weather ship: it only appears to work when there’s lots of job opportunities for the low-income, single parents.

Croak, posted in comments on that blog. Posted here as a record, and in case Dr. Bernstein doesn't pass it through moderation.

This was made possible by the conservative Democrats; it was proposed by Bill Clinton. The same faction to which Obama belongs, which controls the Democratic Party, and which, in coalition with the Wall Street Republicans, now governs the USA and will probably do so for at least the rest of the decade – that is, if the Tea Party Republicans don’t simply take over.

“Screaming in language that no one understands / Of the rights that we grabbed with our own bleeding hands / When we wiped out the bosses / And stormed through the wall / Of the prison they told us would outlast us all // Marat we’re poor / And the poor stay poor / Marat don’t make us wait any more. / We want our rights and we don’t care how / We want a revolution – now.”--Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade.

Croak of the Day

Is this really my first post of 2012? So it is. Well, I've been busy. And it's just a "what he said."

Anyhow, today's Croak of the Day goes to Robert Reich.

The Republican right thinks Paul’s views on the economy are responsible for this fire among the young. I just now squared off with Larry Kudlow and Steve Moore on Larry’s CNBC program, both of whom are convinced young people are attracted by Paul’s strict adherence to the views of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, and Paul’s desire to move America back to the gold standard.

Wrong. The young are flocking to Ron Paul because he wants to slice military spending, bring our troops home, stop government spying on American citizens for the purpose of homeland security, and legalize pot.--link