[Dialogue] Civil Society Slow Motion Train Wreck like Wisconsin

[Ellie Stock]

Thanks, Steve.
Ellie


-----Original Message-----
From: steve har <stevehar11201 at gmail.com>
To: dialogue <dialogue at wedgeblade.net>
Sent: Wed, Jun 6, 2012 8:13 am
Subject: [Dialogue] Civil Society Slow Motion Train Wreck like Wisconsin


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
_______________________________________________
Dialogue mailing list
Dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net
http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/dialogue-wedgeblade.net

 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue-wedgeblade.net/attachments/20120606/53914bc2/attachment-0001.html>