[Dialogue] Civil Society Slow Motion Train Wreck like Wisconsin

[Marianna Bailey]

Thanks, well said. My question is how do we (the 99%) avert the train wreck?

Marianna
On Jun 6, 2012, at 9:13 AM, steve har wrote:

> To Sunny Walker and others who kvetch about whether the President
> should wear "white gloves" in policy and politics. Really curious
> about your view point, where you stand that makes this an interesting
> question.
> 
> Today's  Wisconsin election results make it clear -one more time- who
> has set the table of policy and politics in this country and who is
> causing a slow motion train wreck in civil society. What I say is
> there is an Ayn Rand conservative counter-revolution going on and it
> leaves critiques of Obama pretty irrelevant.
> 
> Obama kvetching actually mises the entire point, something like the
> fans watching a  baseball game at Wrigley field on Fox News mis the
> point. They don't notice  #10 million dollars that the Wrigley Field
> owners choose put into socially conservative political campaigns and
> support political functionaries like Scott Walker. The TV game
> watchers love watching the game real or political baseball, but her
> opinions actually make no difference whatsoever.
> 
> In Costa Rica, where I often gather with the Democrats Abroad and try
> to get US Citizens to register and vote from abroad, many people
> -Costa Ricans and Americans alike- see the stakes in the game quite
> differently because there is a little longer view to things, a little
> further away from things.
> 
> Since the Reagan era there is a systematic counter revolution underway
> to take apart FDR style social democracy which created a large middle
> class by bootstrapping people into the middle class with universal
> education, bank loans available to ordinary people, social security
> and medicare.
> 
> It is the model that Costa Rica followed after 1948 after the
> revolution against United Fruit and others. FDR style social democracy
> helped Costa Rica to become a stable peaceful country with a large
> middle class. It is one of the reasons Costa Ricans so admire the
> United States and are so concerned for the future direction of the
> country and its well-being.
> 
> The shape of FDR style social democracy is like the shape of a
> diamond, like a wide baseball diamond,  with a really wide middle
> class, a relatively small wealthy class and a relatively small poor
> class.
> 
> The shape of the conservative model- underway since the 1980s - is Ayn
> Rand's  model of Libertarian oligarchy where the social philosophy is
> something like "I got mine, why don't you get busy and find some
> work".
> 
> The oligarchy is a pyramid. There s a group very wealthy people
> libertarian-conservative people on top - people like the Koch bothers
> - who organize and fund people like Scott Walker to look after their
> personal and financial interests with tax breaks and tax loopholes and
> attacks on pensions, teachers, public employees, and the rest of it.
> 
> There is a whole class of fanboys like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh
> getting wealthy by hooting and hollering and shilling.   Everyone else
> isn't really a matter of concern unless they by the soap suds.  The
> trendy name for this oligarchy is th 1%. Everyone else is the 99%
> 
> So Sunny I'm thinking your views attention & diserve respect and and
> good humor too. But I differ re your Obama criticism because it misses
> the point; I think your views are the views of a detached spectator
> watching the game from the peanut stand and the peanut stand  doesn't
> notice the train wreck happening in civil society.
> 
> There is a story developing now to tell about an entire group of
> middle class managers, teachers, firefighters, ordinary people
> outsourced from their jobs - even highly skilled facilitators -
> watching this  game playout - this slow motion train wreck taking
> place -some are wide awake, some are putting on and taking off their
> white-gloves.
> 
> I'm interested in finding out where you stand in the
> revolution-counter revolution of our time.
> 
> JP Sartre CS1 paper on Social Revolutionaries is a more interesting
> topic to me than the topic you raise.
> 
> Consider this poem that I can still hear in Charles Lingo's booming voice
> http://www.kalliope.org/da/digt.pl?longdid=lawrence2001061107
> 
> If you like I'll get you some digital photos of Kaye Hayes teaching
> notes on Sartre's paper to help you figuring out where you stand in
> the counter-revolution at hand. You don't get to be a spectator with
> "interesting opinions".
> 
> I think "professional facilitators" can and may loose their gigs too,
> just like the teachers and firefighters and police that are going to
> loose their jobs in Wisconsin thanks to The Kochs and right wing money
> funding Scott Walker's 31 million dollar campaign.
> 
> Wondering why you're kvetching about Obama?
> Wondering if you have anything to say about the editorial in the
> Nation this morning?
> 
> Steve Harrington
> ---
> The Nation
> http://www.thenation.com/blog/168242/recall-campaign-against-scott-walker-fails
> 
> Robert M. La Follette, the architect of the progressive movement that
> a century ago made Wisconsin the nation's "laboratory of democracy,"
> recognized that the experiments would at times go awry. "We have long
> rested comfortably in this country upon the assumption that because
> our form of government was democratic, it was therefore automatically
> producing democratic results. Now, there is nothing mysteriously
> potent about the forms and names of democratic institutions that
> should make them self-operative," he observed after suffering more
> than his share of defeats. "Tyranny and oppression are just as
> possible under democratic forms as under any other."
> 
> Those words echoed across the decades on the night of June 5, as the
> most powerful of the accountability tools developed in La Follette's
> laboratory -- the right to recall errant officials -- proved
> insufficient for the removal of Governor Scott Walker.
> 
> The failure of the campaign against Walker, while heartbreaking for
> Wisconsin union families and the great activist movement that
> developed to counter the governor and his policies, offers profound
> lessons not just for Wisconsin but for a nation that is wrestling with
> fundamental questions of how to counter corporate and conservative
> power in a Citizens United moment. Those lessons are daunting, as they
> suggest the "money power" populists and progressives of another era
> identified as the greatest threat to democracy has now organized
> itself as a force that cannot be easily thwarted even by determined
> "people power."
> 
> 
> --
> Steve Harrington
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