A Perverse Symmetry

I wrote this last week. It appears the tide has turned and just maybe the reactionary right has over played its hand. See the recent NY Times poll.

Anyone following the standoff in Wisconsin will see a certain perverse symmetry. A Republican dominated Supreme Court first radically alters campaigning financing rules with the Citizens United decision to allow corporations and their primary adversaries, trade unions, to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections under the rubric of “free speech” Of course the good justices knew full well this is like pitting a the NFL against some high school football league in terms of available cash to spend on elections. In the US union membership has been steadily falling from over a 1/3 of the workforce in 1945 to only 7.9% by 2004. Private-sector union membership has shrunk the most, to a mere 6.9% of the private sector workforce as of 2010, while public-sector union membership is still running at over 36% . So is there any mystery as to what is going on in Wisconsin? It is plain and simple. The Republicans Party and the oligarchy (read: a cabal of the ultra rich) that it represents is using the recession and the concurrent problems with state budgets to destroy the last surviving remnant of the union movement - public-sector unions.

So with private-sector unions on the rocks due to union busting and race-to-the-bottom global economics, Republicans and their minions in the media have of late been concentrating on undermining the support with the American public for the surviving public-sector unions. And this super recession is a perfect opportunity. The five Supreme Court (presumably opposed to “judicial activism”) who voted in favor of giving First Amendment rights to corporations and unions were obviously aware that private-sector unions in the US are in serious decline. So it was easy to allow money equals free speech for corporations and for their polar opposites, unions. Private sector unions are becoming a paper tiger, especially with the US economy seemingly permanently unable to create enough jobs. Yet public sector unions are still strong. So prior to the upcoming watershed of an election in 2012, Republicans have their long knives out for the last bastion of American organized labor - public sector unions.

And feeding into this is the perpetual dissatisfaction of Americans with our education system. This dissatisfaction is being used to undermine faith in a unionized part of the public-sector union movement - the American schoolteacher. School teaching always been an underpaid and under-appreciated profession. Teachers are constantly being pilloried and blamed in the media for all the myriad ills of the American education system. Bad teachers that can't be fired ' because of their unions' and 'their awful tenure system' is a constant refrain by the right. The underfunding and neglect of the very school districts that need support the most, those that serve the inner city poor is conveniently ignored, as is the the societal feedback loop of social decay and despair in the underclass families that serves up students with horrendous disadvantages. Instead it is all blamed on the hapless teachers who work in these drug and gang infested war zones. Perennial underfunding of education at the state level was caused by the so-called taxpayers revolt mania which started in California in the 1980s with Jarvis Gann and which spread like wildfire across the country. And, of course, there it is always easy to generate animosity and jealousy against 'government workers' by creating the perception that people with cushy 'government jobs' have it made and that the state budget crisis is the fault of their greedy, obstreperous unions.

When this stubborn kings hell of a recession hit, many states suddenly found themselves seriously in the red, and it was time to find a scapegoat. So it was easy to blame it on the defined benefit pensions and solid health plans that state, county and city workers have been able to achieve usually by trading off cost-of-living wage increases. The perpetual underfunding of governments at all levels due to tax cut madness especially for upper tiers of income is conveniently ignored. But with Wisconsin, it was only different. Compared with other states their budget deficit was only shallow hole. But one which the Republican libertarian ideologue of a governor made deeper with irresponsible tax cuts. Make no mistake this is a test case. If a manufactured budget crisis can be used to destroy public-sector unions in Wisconsin, all of the states with real budget problems will be pushovers for attacking the concept of public-sector unions and collective bargaining in general. Make no mistake this is class warfare!