“He who controls the narrative wins the Field.” Might just be the 21st century take on The Art of War.
Behind the republican legislative victories in state and national government is a power grab by elite corporations and ultra-right-wing wealthy businessmen. State governments have become their latest play toy. Having schemed for decades to destroy public sector unions, whose members favor effective government, living wages, the continued existence of a middle class and an economic and social environment in which businesses and wealthy Americans carry a fair share of the financial cost of infrastructure and equity, the elite sensed a time of union vulnerability. Forty years of deregulation, corporate welfare, tax cuts for the wealthy, i.e., supply-side economics, had left the economy teetering on collapse.
The supply-siders had a profound advantage. New generations of citizen-consumers came of age in an economic and social climate that was blindly, unthinkingly anti-union, that indulged in the bubble markets of the nineties and the new century, that left government largely to ideological specialists, narcissists, sociopaths (and one notable alcoholic), that lived in social and ideological bubbles of their own, remarkably enured, with few exceptions, to the revelations inherent in foreign travel and foreign study.
Generations of ethnocentric, a-historical, anti-intellectual, me-first, democracy-means-laissez-faire-business-practice Americans, raised at the tit of cheap oil and moving about in climes increasingly proscribed by corporate avarice, co-dependent on corporations if viewed in the best light, can fully be expected to spout the corporate line, believing it to be both their own, and in their own best interest.
The public was certainly receptive: corporate, financial and speculatory malfeasance had caused the the Great Recession, but the public memory for this fact was shockingly short. Public anger and subsequent push for regulatory reform dissipated as more immediate and pressing concerns loomed. Family concerns, entertainment consumption and attention to the family's financial solvency took time and energy away from the need to help the country begin a return to accountability, responsibility and long-term thinking. This is not the same thing as the pretense to fiscal responsibility being foisted by the republicans of late. Indeed, the republican citizens' normative thinking and planning habits are overwhelmingly short-term, (even in regards to retirement planning; more on this topic in a future blog), a perfect match with supply-side economic theory. Long-term sustainability is noticeably absent from the formula.
Besides, corporate chess-moves remain remote, most often far beyond the horizons of mere wage earners. The effects are calculated to creep slowly into the lives of ordinary citizens, often going unnoticed. But consider the frog in the experiment where the water in which he floats is slowly brought to a boil. The creature alters its metabolism, adjusting itself for far too long. Only when the water has grown too hot, long past survivable, does it attempt to flee.
Mainstream media is “reporting” (repeating) the republican talking points with precious little analysis. It would take time (cut to commercial) and space (no room for the ad about selling your gold jewelry) and comprehension. Reporters would have to consult with tax law experts, economists, pension fund managers and political scientists, and synthesize the mass of data. Skip the politicians. (With precious few exceptions, most are looking past the reporter to the next election.) Maybe even pre-empt the TV-land demagogues and their information-starved, hour-long rants and put the nation ahead of ratings.
On-the-scene reporters are busy ambulance-chasing the standoff in Madison, WI. The latest tiff is magnified all out of proportion by the very act of covering it and becomes the tone-setting lens through which the casual and half-interested viewer sees this larger and more subtle war.
But Scott Walker's handlers are happy. Coaching and cash from ultra-right wing Koch-funded groups like Americans for Prosperity (Prosperity for a select few, that is) has helped the ideologically-blinded republican governor and knee-jerk republican majorities in the legislature frame the showdown as one between greedy Public Sector unions and "fiscally responsible" republicans.
Walker and the republican legislators are just the kinds of “citizens” and “legislators” that wealthy and corporate America want.
What follows is part one of an argument. It is not the blueprint for any screaming match with an agitated, ill-informed neighbor. That advances nothing and stalls insight, reflection, and collaborative change. And the United States must change: change course economically, socially, legally. Now we must describe the tilted economic playing field that corporate America has graded and seeded in the past forty-odd years, and recall the history of organized labor and its place alongside organized business in this democratic republic. Share this information in the first of hopefully many conversations with well-meaning, fear-driven neighbors, some of whom paint the world in apocalyptic colors.
So the first false premise to attack is that unions are greedy. Saturday is the perfect day to have an over- the-fence discussion on this fallacy. Since your neighbor may say one thing among private sector friends and yet have a modicum of empathy in your presence, he or she is curious about how public sector workers think. What a perfect time to ask them why they are not at work.
The conception of Saturday as a day off from work is recent, as is the 8 hour work day and forty hour work week. Until the late 1930s, a six day, 10 hour-a-day work week was more the norm for the blue collar worker. Unions battled with greedy managers and businessmen for the worker's right to have a life outside of work, for the recognition that humans do not exist to be dehumanized cogs in a giant corporate combine.
Workplace safety standards could be construed as greedy, if you think a worker's right to keep all of his limbs is an unreasonable constraint on corporate productivity. Unions won many battles with the-bottom-line-is-all-that-matters management drones and money-mad businessmen over working conditions, and safety features now taken as commonplace and logical were once only dreams. We realize more fully now that if an injured worker is no longer efficient and is fired, the loss of income devastates him, but also his family. They become a drain on private and public charity and adversely affect the producers and retailers who sold goods to the worker and his family. Workmen's compensation, rehabilitation and retraining were haphazard to nonexistent until mid-century, and only became normative when the productivity and well-being of the worker was recognized as a component of the well-being of the economy and the nation, not merely the company.
To put unions squarely back in the mainstream of American life, remind your neighbor about the “Miracle on the Hudson,” the US Airways Airbus A320 passenger liner that lost power to both engines shortly after takeoff and made an emergency landing in the Hudson River. All of the 155 people aboard survived. The cool-as-a-cucumber pilot and co-pilot followed established procedures to try and restart the engines, and when those steps failed, followed established procedures to properly land the plane, upright and intact, on the river.
Those pilots belonged to a union, the Airline Pilots Association.
The cabin crew, who followed established, rehearsed evacuation procedures, and manifested calm efficiency to worried passengers, also belong to a union, the Association of Flight Attendants.
The Air Traffic Controllers, who followed established, rehearsed emergency procedures and thus could quickly allocate flight corridors, re-route other air traffic and offer landing options, belong to a union, the National Air traffic Controllers Association.
The crew aboard the ferry boats that plucked the passengers from the wings and life rafts were trained and rehearsed in established water rescue procedures, and belong to the Seafarers International Union.
Management, concerned with profit and loss in free-market competition, pays little attention to “external costs” such as safety and pollution, until disaster and loss of life and limb make it bad public relations to ignore the worker and the consumer. Witness the spate of mine-tunnel explosions, mine-tunnel collapses, and the resulting injuries and deaths among miners worldwide. Strong unions alert the public and the government to work-related dangers and push for safety-first working conditions and effective oversight and regulation. Corporatania, a provincial mind-set unto itself, blasts these changes as job-killing and impossible to implement because they will eliminate profit. (Stop hyperventilating Big-Money, you're catastrophizing.) But in supply-side economics, the absence of these reforms eliminates lives. More importantly (This will make the bean counters' and CFOs' ears perk up, providing they want to hear it.), operating without safety equipment and procedures costs the corporation more than having them in place and functional. Let's ask BP, in the wake of the Gulf Oil Spill Disaster, to weigh the cost of multiple and redundent blow-out prevention technology, properly maintained and regularly tested, against the cost of cleanup operations. And let's assign a value to the loss of species-abundance and diversity and all the similar costs which BP will insist are not quantifiable and should not even be footnoted. While we're at it, what cost to the gulf economy did the spill incur?
Corporate lapdogs argue that unions have done what needed to be done to secure workers' rights and safety, but now their time has passed and they are no longer needed.
This statement is never made by a union member, someone who has been on the receiving end of management guile. It is the fox insisting he is perfectly trustworthy and will guard the hen house with his life.
The untruth is evident when you examine Maternity Leave, Paternity Leave, and associated Parental Leave. The U.S. is the only industrialized nation that offers no national paid leave benefit. Ten weeks was the norm for shared Parental Leave in Canada (“shared” meaning the mother might take, say, seven weeks, and the father would take the balance, three) but his was recently raised to 35 weeks. American parents will be astonished to know that this Canadian Parental Leave is in addition to 15 weeks of Maternity Leave.
European nations, too, also show greater awareness of the benefit to productivity that is associated with respecting workers' rights to a life outside of work. France offers 16 weeks at 100% pay for the first child, Denmark and Lithuania offer 52 weeks, Norway 56 weeks, Sweden even more.
Even impoverished, relatively non-industrialized African nations show more long-term thinking: 14 weeks at 100% pay for the Malagasy, the citizens of Madagascar whose gross national income is $911.00 per wage earner per year.
“Ahh,” say the corporate apologists, “You said National Paid Leave Benefit! That's Socialism!” As if this label, intended disparagingly and hinting vaguely at Soviet-style governance, was clear evidence of a liberal plot to overthrow our government.
Excuse me a moment....
I'm back, though I'm still bursting into fitful laughter. Corporate apologists are such cut-ups! They did it again: they conflated the corporate welfare state we're stuck in with the ideals of the democratic republic we live in. This calculated ploy deters true-believer Republicans and more moderate Republican-leaning citizens from looking at the Social-Democratic forms of governance common in Europe, swallowing a monumental amount of pride (the kind with nationalist overtones), bursting those “America-First!” egos (That exclamation, by the way, is usually accompanied by a raised fist and can look remarkably socialist.) and seeing the production efficiencies inherent in respecting, rather than merely exploiting, a labor force.
Corporate lobbyists have diverted monumental sums to their own bank accounts lobbying against Maternity and Paternity leave, and obfuscate the production efficiencies of adopting these types of leave. But why? Why would corporate America work against its own best interests? And what does this have to do with the Corporate-underwriting of the Republican attack against public sector unions, and my over-the-fence chat with that neighbor?
The essay concludes in the next blog. Here's a teaser:
The monied class believe themselves blessed, special. To quote the Pig in George Orwell's Animal Farm, “All animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
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