“segregation today…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever”

However awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

--Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, “Getting Away with It,” New York Review of Books,”  July 12, 2012. 

Paul Krugman must be given a great deal of credit for his constant efforts in the pages of the New York Times to get policy makers to listen to reason and take the steps necessary to turn the American economy around.  For those sympathetic to his view, however, there has been frustration about his reluctance to, shall we say, name names, to allow himself to even speculate in print about why it is the Republican Party has resorted to its gridlock strategy.   Now, in a review titled “Getting Away with It,” in the current New York Review of Books, (NYR), Krugman has gone on the record.  Krugman’s wife, Robin Wells, herself a respected economist and journalist, co-authored the article.  What they have together produced is a devastating indictment of Republican ideology and tactics.

As one reads their article, it becomes clear why (as they do in the first line of the excerpt above) the authors choose the euphemism “awkward” to describe the position they and their colleagues are in when it comes to candidly describing the wellsprings of  Republican strategy.  In a word, it is all about race.   Outright “dangerous” would probably be a more accurate word to describe the position one puts oneself in this country for merely suggesting that racism is a lingering cancer in America.  It must have taken considerable courage for Krugman and Wells to write this piece.  They are to be commended for it.

Ever since Barack Obama took office, right wing opposition to him and to his policies has become more and more virulent.  Such zealotry and fanaticism, such eye-rolling, hair-pulling and submission to raptures has not been seen in this country since the Civil War. Here is what I wrote in “A Lunatic Fringe Poised to Take Power” on June 17:

The passivity of the Democratic Party in recent years, its willingness to "compromise," (particularly since Arkansan Bill Clinton, supposedly the "first Black president," invited serious inroads into the hard-won protections of the New Deal such as the tearing up of Glass-Steagall), created an ideological vacuum which allowed heretofore unheard of incursions of what were once considered uniquely Southern manifestations such as "Bible Belt" evangelism and the generalized notion that the working class, even if it could not literally be enslaved, should be overseen by an aristocratic, neo-plantation-owner class that would keep them in line.  Thus, while, their darkest fantasies aside, no one would accuse the right of planning to reinstitute black slavery, a case can be made that some form of wage slavery would be just fine.   A nation which once fought a war (in which casualties by latest estimate numbered over 700,000 of its citizens) ostensibly not to end but to stop the spread of slavery outside of the deep South, now stands by as the values of the deep South threaten to engulf the entire nation.

 The NYR piece is a review of three books:  Noam Scheiber’s The Escape Artists, (“an inside account of Obama’s economic team from the early days of the presidential transition to late 2011”), Thomas Frank’s Pity the Billionaire (in which Frank describes the current crisis as “something unique in the history of American social movements: a mass conversion to free-market theory as a response to hard times.”), and Thomas Byrne Edsall’s The Age of Austerity.   It is Edsall’s thesis, namely that the divisions we are seeing are a consequence of scarcity, that finally prompts Krugman and Wells to retort that:

    The truth is that the austerity Edsall emphasizes is more the result than the cause of our embittered politics. We have a depressed economy in large part because Republicans have blocked almost every Obama initiative designed to create jobs, even refusing to confirm Obama nominees to the board of the Federal Reserve. (MIT’s Peter Diamond, a Nobel laureate, was rejected as lacking sufficient qualifications.) We have a huge battle over deficits, not because deficits actually pose an immediate problem, but because conservatives have found deficit hysteria a useful way to attack social programs.

So where does the embittered politics come from? Edsall himself supplies much of the answer. Namely, what he portrays is a Republican Party that has been radicalized not by a struggle over resources—tax rates on the wealthy are lower than they have been in generations—but by fear of losing its political grip as the nation changes. The most striking part of The Age of Austerity, at least as we read it, was the chapter misleadingly titled “The Economics of Immigration.” The chapter doesn’t actually say much about the economics of immigration; what it does, instead, is document the extent to which immigrants and their children are, literally, changing the face of the American electorate.

As Edsall concedes, this changing face of the electorate has had the effect of radicalizing the GOP. “For whites with a conservative bent,” he writes—and isn’t that the very definition of the Republican base?—the shift to a majority-minority nation [i.e., a nation in which minorities will make up the majority] will strengthen the already widely held view that programs benefiting the poor are transferring their taxpayer dollars to minority recipients, from first whites to blacks and now to “browns.”

And that’s the message of Rick Santelli’s rant, right there.

      This is, of course, by no means the first time that undercurrents—or, more often, outright paroxysms of racial conflict have changed the political landscape of the United States.  The Civil War dealt the Confederacy a crushing blow, but it changed few hearts and minds in the South.  The rights and freedoms given the former slaves after the war through the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments (the so-called “Reconstruction Amendments”) vanished as soon as the U.S. army of occupation left the South.  As late as 1963, one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation,  George Wallace could still make the blood of Alabamans boil when he talked about the “infamous, illegal fourteenth amendment. (The great state of Mississippi did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until 1995.)  A rigged presidential election in 1876 put Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House, ended Reconstruction and initiated a century-long reign of terror imposed on Black Americans—replete with Klan robes, lynchings, Black Codes and Jim Crow laws.   Even now, in the twenty-first century, many of the gains and accomplishments made by Black Americans during Reconstruction have not seen their equal.  In 1963, just a few months prior to Martin  Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream speech” on the steps of the Lincoln monument, the good citizens of Alabama greeted George Wallace’s inaugural speech proclamation, “segregation today…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever” with enthusiastic applause.

     Wallace's inaugural address is well worth reading in its entirety.  Nearly half a century later, it may be read essentially as the philosophy and program of the 21st- century Republican Party.  The so-called Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and '70s was in effect a second Civil War.  It is easy for many Americans to forget that it was only the use of Federal troops in the South that finally forced change.  There is little reflection either on the hundreds of American cities that had erupted into insurrection during that period, with tanks rolling down American streets a common occurrence.  But just as the South responded to the Civil War and Reconstruction through terror, there would be push-back to the reaffirmation of our laws that was accomplished through the Civil Rights Act.  Wallace had issued the call:

Hear me, Southerners! You sons and daughters who have moved north and west throughout this nation . . . . we call on you from your native soil to join with us in national support and vote . . and we know . . . wherever you are . . away from the hearths of the Southland . . . that you will respond, for though you may live in the fartherest (sic) reaches of this vast country . . . . your heart has never left Dixieland.

And you native sons and daughters of old New England's rock-ribbed patriotism . . . and you sturdy natives of the great Mid-West . . and you descendants of the far West flaming spirit of pioneer freedom . . we invite you to come and be with us . . for you are of the Southern spirit . . and the Southern philosophy . . . you are Southerners too and brothers with us in our fight.

     It would take until 1980 for the reorganized forces of Southern reaction to finally have their way.  Wallace's call to like-minded citizens outside of the South would finally be realized.   Following the Civil Rights Act, the South abandoned the Democratic Party and became solidly Republican.   The election of Ronald Reagan signaled a fundamental redrawing of the political map.  Barack Obama is not only the first Black president, he is the first Northerner to take the White House since John F. Kennedy.  With the exception of Gerald Ford, an accidental president, Sun belt and Bible belt have dominated now for half a century.  Southern politicians stashed their white suits and Panama hats and went to Brooks Brothers for their pin-stripes while the Northern white working class--frightened, frustrated, often forced out of their homes through block-busting--cleaved to Ronald Reagan as their savior, abandoning the Democratic Party wholesale.  The premium placed on suburbanization and the assault on unions would permanently alter the character of the Democratic Party.

     There are those on the left who demur from laying the blame for what has happened in this country to race, insisting that it is all about class.  While they proceed to split hairs, the end result has been that few if any Americans will frankly confront the cancer that has festered in our nation since its inception.  Some may feel, (including our Black president), that the issue is too volatile, a skeleton best left in the closet.  Better to be polite and hope that reason will prevail.  Even our Black citizens are wary--and this in spite of the fact that they have suffered more than any other Americans through the recent crisis.  One analyst stated that it would take 500 years for Black America to regain the wealth that it lost after 2008.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

Readers of Thatched Cottage may recall that in my blog of March 13th of this year, titled "Our Amorphous Constitutional Protections," I reproduced the picture below, obviously created by another American citizen who fears that we may soon be running, as Cary Grant did in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, from predator drones.  I will confess to being shocked to find that President Obama, who ran promising a change from the Bush administration, has already signed on to fill the American skies with military drones.  I reproduce here the full text of the article which presently appears on the World Socialist web site (wsws.org).   I cannot recall seeing the story in the New York Times for some reason.
     In a way, this is nothing new.  A PBS documentary on the Cold War (now apparently deeply shelved beyond reach in its archives) once showed how the U.S. spent billions of dollars to monitor Soviet submarines in the Pacific Ocean by covering basically every inch of the planet's largest body of water with radar buoys.  It then went to the expense of training hundreds of surveillance workers to just stare at radar screens twenty-four hours a day.  Military experts at the time bragged that, while at first monitors had trouble distinguishing between dolphins and submarines, they soon could spot not only nuclear subs but distinguish between ocean species.  I can only assume that the program is still in place and that we are still paying for it.  It seems that there is endless money to spend on projects such as these, very little for meeting social needs.  Many believe that the USSR collapsed because they just couldn't keep up with our military expenditures and wasted too much their resources in the effort.  Ironically, the US may meet a similar fate fighting enemies imagined and domestic, let alone the real bad guys.









Thousands of military drones to be deployed over US mainland

By Tom Carter
18 June 2012

A recent Department of Defense report to Congress as well as a number of media investigations have exposed government plans to deploy tens of thousands of drones over the US mainland in the coming years.

Predator drone firing hellfire missile

An investigative report published over the weekend by the Christian Science Monitor cited the government’s own estimates that “as many as 30,000 drones could be part of intelligence gathering and law enforcement here in the United States within the next ten years.”

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as “drones,” are extremely sophisticated remotely-operated aircraft, developed and manufactured by the military-industrial complex in recent years at a cost of billions of dollars.

Drones vary in size from the four-pound RQ-11B Raven surveillance drone, which can be launched by hand, to the giant MQ-9 Reaper combat drone, manufactured by Northrup Grumman. The Reaper has a maximum take-off weight of 7,000 pounds, including up to 3,000 pounds of bombs, missiles and other armaments.

The infamous MQ-1 Predator drone, armed with 100-pound Hellfire missiles, is the Obama administration’s favored weapon in its illegal assassination program. A Predator drone was used in the unprecedented assassination of a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen last September.

With a push of a button, thousands of pounds of high explosives can be dropped on anyone, anywhere in the world, with startling precision. Safe behind video screens at military bases within the US, military drone operators refer to their victims as “bug splats.” Thousands of innocent civilians have already been murdered in this way in Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Current and projected drone bases in the US [Source: US Air Force]

An April Department of Defense report, titled “Future Unmanned Aircraft Systems Training, Operations, and Sustainability,” reveals that a massive drone infrastructure is already being erected within the US, with billions of dollars being allocated, bases being erected, thousands of pilots and crews being trained, and inventories being stockpiled.

The report identifies 110 military bases that will serve as drone launch sites. The deadly Predator and Reaper drones will operate out of Creech Air Force Base (AFB) in Nevada, Holloman AFB and Cannon AFB in New Mexico, Fort Drum in New York, Grand Forks in North Dakota, Ellsworth AFB in South Dakota, Whiteman AFB in Missouri, and the Southern California Logistics Airport, among others.

The accompanying map, from an Air Force power-point presentation released this month, shows current and projected locations for drone bases within the US.

The Department of Defense report argues for lifting the current framework of restrictions on drone flights over the US on the grounds that it “does not provide the level of airspace access necessary to accomplish the wide range of DoD UAS missions at current and projected operational tempos (OPTEMPOs).”

The language of the report is revealing and ominous. “This constraint will only be exacerbated as combat operations shift from abroad and systems return to US locations,” the report states. It expressly refers to plans to “conduct continental United States (CONUS)-based missions.”

In January, Congress passed HR 658, which requires the Federal Aviation Administration to take steps to facilitate the integration of drones “into the national airspace system.” President Obama signed the bill on February 14 with no public discussion or comment. (See “Drones come to the US”)

Since Obama signed the bill, hundreds of drones have already begun flying over the US to spy on and monitor the population. A recent ABC News investigative report entitled “UAVs: Will Our Civil Liberties Be Droned Out?” outlined the possibility of drones buzzing overhead becoming “a fact of daily life.”

ABC News reported: “Drones can carry facial recognition cameras, license plate scanners, thermal imaging cameras, open WiFi sniffers, and other sensors. And they can be armed.”

“Among the most eager to fly domestic drones are America’s police departments,” the report stated. “In Texas, a Montgomery county sheriff’s office recently said it would deploy a drone bought with money from a Department of Homeland Security grant and was contemplating arming the drone with non-lethal weapons like tear gas, rubber bullets or Taser-style rounds.”

The ABC News report identified “political protests” as one of the activities that can be monitored by drones.

In December, the American Civil Liberties Union published a detailed report on the dangers of a massive build-up of surveillance drones within the US, warning that “our privacy laws are not strong enough to ensure that the new technology will be used responsibly and consistently with democratic values.”

Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the ACLU, described last month a “nightmare scenario” of widespread drone spying leading “to an oppressive atmosphere where people learn to think twice about everything they do, knowing that it will be recorded, charted, scrutinized by increasingly intelligent computers, and possibly used to target them.”

According to a Los Angeles Times article in December of last year, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) are already using Predator drones for operations within the US. Last week, a huge Global Hawk drone being operated by the US Navy for an unknown purpose crashed in Maryland.

The deployment of tens of thousands of surveillance drones over the mainland US takes on special significance in light of recent revelations that the Obama administration is secretly constructing “bottomless” databases to house information gathered about US citizens. (See “Obama administration expands illegal surveillance of Americans”)

The build-up of drone bases within the US is one component of preparations by the US government for a confrontation with its own population. Like everything else associated with the so-called “war on terror”—including torture, detention without trial, warrantless spying, assassinations, military tribunals, and expanded executive and intelligence powers—the use of drones for spying and assassination in the Middle East is a prelude to the development of systems that will ultimately be used against the American people in the event of social upheavals.

On “Terror Tuesdays” at the White House, President Obama helps draw up a list of opponents of US policy overseas who are to be illegally assassinated by drone-fired missiles. These “kill lists” have already included US citizens. With tens of thousands of drones flying overhead, and with the US mainland designated as a “battleground” in the never-ending and geographically unlimited “war on terror,” the US ruling class hopes one day soon to be able to eliminate its domestic opponents with similar ease.

A Lunatic Fringe Poised to Take Power

Call me a masochist, but I have spent considerable time watching C-Span's coverage of the seemingly countless right wing events and rallies designed to electrify the right wing base in anticipation of the next elections.  If I did not have an innocent's basic trust of C-Span as an institution, I might conclude that they are intentionally drowning us in right wing propaganda.  It seems the right wing gets a lot more time.  I choose rather to conclude that C-Span is actually doing us a service by taking us into the belly of the right wing beast and letting us in on what they are really like, particularly when they are among friends and taking on the role of cheerleaders for the cause.     Newt Gingrich has the gift of being able to impersonate a rational human being.  He has assimilated some of the mannerisms of the liberal establishment only so that he can effectively turn those very mannerisms against their source.  In one recent speech, he stated that the 2012 election will be "the most important election since the election of 1860."  He did not elaborate, but given the tenor of his speech, one can speculate.  The election of 1860 gave us Abraham Lincoln and precipitated the firing on Fort Sumter.  I wonder, does Newt think the country would have been better off if Lincoln had lost?  It is worthwhile to revisit the 1860 election, in which, as it turned out, Lincoln won with only 40% of the popular vote, the remainder being divided between the Southern candidates, Breckinridge and Bell and Douglas, the Illinois Democrat.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1860)

     There has been the growing sense, for a long time, but particularly since the election of our first Black president, that the right smells an opportunity not merely to roll back American history to the time before the New Deal, but to the time before the Civil War and Reconstruction.  (In the case of George Bush, we even seemed in danger of going back to a period before the Magna Carta of 1215 which established that the "law of the land" trumped the whims of the monarch. Aspects of Bush's magisterial overreach sadly linger in the Obama administration.)

     The passivity of the Democratic Party in recent years, its willingness to "compromise," (particularly since Arkansan Bill Clinton, supposedly the "first Black president," invited serious inroads into the hard-won protections of the New Deal such as the tearing up of Glass-Steagall), created an ideological vacuum which allowed heretofore unheard of incursions of what were once considered uniquely Southern manifestations such as "Bible Belt" evangelism and the generalized notion that the working class, even if it could not literally be enslaved, should be overseen by an aristocratic, neo-plantation-owner class that would keep them in line.  Thus, while, their darkest fantasies aside, no one would accuse the right of planning to reinstitute black slavery, a case can be made that some form of wage slavery would be just fine.   A nation which once fought a war (in which casualties by latest estimate numbered over 700,000 of its citizens) ostensibly not to end but to stop the spread of slavery outside of the deep South, now stands by as the values of the deep South threaten to engulf the entire nation.

      The right wing tantrum that we are currently being treated to goes largely without a response from whatever you want to call the vestigial "left" in this country.   Obama is portrayed as the anti-Christ, a foreigner, a socialist, anti-religion, anti-freedom.  Large numbers of Americans are ill-equipped to put the right wing hate campaign in any perspective.  Many are poorly educated thanks to the decades long campaign against education in this country.  Even the minority who read anything are constantly being told that the mainstream media is controlled by the left (a laughable notion given who owns media in this country) and therefore not to be trusted.  Thus the cosmically disingenuous criticisms of Obama for not making more progress on the economy or giving us a health plan we could all greet with enthusiasm when lack of progress is the direct result of the Republican Party's brazenly announced strategy of gridlock.  The half a quadrillion in dervivatives still floating in the financial ether that were the result of amazing corporate greed made possible by shooting down all sane regulation are ignored.
      What had always been an undercurrent in our history, obvious even in the compromises which gave us our constitution, that is, the fear that democacy was equal to mob rule, has now become an overarching theme.  Undercurrents and once-thought-of as relatively innocuous palliatives such as agnostic Ike inserting "under God" into the pledge of allegiance have been reborn as mainstream thought.  History is daily being rewritten and carved into stone.   Even elementary school students were once taught, for example, that the founding fathers, children of the Englightenment, had been deists rather than members of any Protestant sect.  Now, however, Thomas Jefferson, a man as likely to believe in the divinity of Jesus as he might the tooth fairy, is being reconstrued as a devout Christian.  The combination of religious zealotry and its accompanying tendency to find science deeply suspect is responsible for the wholesale rewriting of our textbooks to ensure that future generations of American children will be able to envision Jefferson as a church-goer and dinosaur bones as bogus artifacts planted by left wing conspirators.  Aiding in this effort is the emergence of countless right wing "think tanks" having constant seminars with all the trappings of orthodox academia--the blue back drops with neatly printed logos, Q and A's with three questions at a time being taken from the floor, the right mix of old line WASP "hands" and neo-liberal cabalists.
     The current occupant of the White House has revealed himself to be not quite the "change" millions of Americans who have not yet drunk from the poisoned well had hoped for.  It would not be too extreme to state baldly that many feel duped by the 2008 election.  Election results in 2010 and in Massachusetts and the recent failed recall in Wisconsin are other disturbing possible harbingers of what can occur when large numbers of voters feel they were betrayed.  And the current Republican candidate seems relatively innocuous compare to, let's say, a Gingrich, a Santorum or a Palin.  But if the Republicans take the White House in November, the lunatic fringe in this country will go on a rampage.
      

Scott Walker and the Union Movement

While it would not be an exaggeration to say that I am heartbroken over the outcome of the move to replace Wisconsin's Scott Walker, it did serve the purpose of prompting me to consider why a majority of voters find him (and his like in other venues, such as Chris Christie and Paul Ryan), an acceptable leader.   How do we explain, progressives can often be heard to ask, why it is that large numbers--increasingly a majority--of Americans vote against their own interests? Those on the left do much head-scratching over why, in the heat of a financial crisis visited upon us by billionaire hedge fund managers, the average American expresses far more anger toward the guy down the block who happens to belong to a union.  Some write off this tendency as mere jealousy.  Your neighbor with a union card is a far more convenient target of opportunity than the one percent of his fellow Americans hidden from view in their gated, country club communities.  In fact, given the prevailing values of capitalist America, the one percent are actually respected and admired, just one lottery ticket away from being the neighbors you really deserve.  While those who occupy Zucotti Park are depicted as a lot of grungy malcontents in the financial district, the one percent are the true occupiers of Wall Street, a capitalist Valhalla synonymous with what was once called the Great American Dream.  The forty-eight percent of us who are either dismayed by or contemptuous of this attitude, however, may want to reflect on one significant reason the divide among us developed.
     Ultimately, the thread that runs through not merely the success of opportunistic demagogues on the right but also the Tea Party phenomenon and the general drift to the right in this country reveals the deep and lingering effects of a once fiercely debated issue in the American union movement, namely, the tendency to create what was called an "aristocracy of labor."  It is a dichotomy as old as the battles that once took place between the A.F. of L. and the C.I.O.  It helps to explain how during the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, teachers, rather than corporate felons, became public enemy number one.
    It is often pointed out that union membership in this country, once at 40% of the work force, has declined to the 12% or so who continue hold union cards.  Changes in the global economy, outsourcing, the nation's post-1960s social battles and the fact that unions were never exactly popular, have all contributed to this outcome, but the inherent conflicts in the history of the union movement have also played a large role. 
     Needless to say, throughout our history, the owners of American business did their best to block unions from forming in the first place and, where that failed, resorted to subverting or pacifying them the best they could.  Union organizers were characterized as communists, un-American, but because the union movement became an inexorable force growing out of the desperate economic conditions of the early twentieth century, it was seen as an evil better to tolerate than invite more dire alternatives.  This is not to say that the truce that came to exist between the big unions and goverment was not hard won.  Incidents of striking workers being clubbed, shot down or even massacred riddle our history.   If unions were never popular, the main culprit was obviously the unrelenting campaign against them spear-headed by business interests.  It is nevertheless important to understand that, for millions of workers, the unions were themselves the problem. 

     The popular 1950s film, On the Waterfront, with Marlon Brando portraying the brother of a thug connected to a corrupt longshoreman's union, might serve as an icon of unionism's divided identity.  From the Teamsters' Jimmy Hoffa to the United Federation of Teachers' Al Shanker, a variety of union leadership evolved that often placed democratic unionists in opposition to their own leadership.  Many union organizers in the 1930s were in fact communists, but by the 1950s and early 1960s, HUAC, McCarthyism and the cold war had forced most radicals out of the movement.  This, of course, did not prevent anti-union interests from continuing to caricature unions as subversive and anti-American.  But the philosophical differences between the school of thought personified by Samuel Gompers, who put a premium on skilled workers, and the opposing view personified by the leadership of the C.I.O., that sought to include all workers, took a toll on the movement as a whole.
     We now have automotive plants and other industries relocating to the South where business need not worry about pesky unions and thus the cost of wages and benefits are minimized.  There was a time when this would have caused great conflict among workers, but now, they see themselves fortunate to just have a job; there is a Chinese boy or girl they are told, who will be happy to do your job for a small fraction of the hourly wage you demand. As a result, the union movement has become essentially moribund.
     Ever since Ronald Reagan destroyed the Air Traffic Controllers' union, there has been an inexorable campaign to entirely expunge an already hobbled union movement from this country.  Unions became a target of opportunity for the right wing, and they have taken full advantage of the historical moment.  Milton Friedman had a virulent hatred of teachers' unions and the full panoply of supposed "reforms", (Cf. Walker's use of this term, the right wing euphemism for rolling back any and all advances since the New Deal), such as charter schools, merit pay, elimination of tenure or, at its most extreme manifestation, as we have seen in Wisconsin, the elimination of collective bargaining for public employees' unions.
    So, yes, my fellow forty-eight percenters, there are good reasons why so many American voters seem to be voting against their own interests.  If the problem of educating working class Americans to who their real enemy is was difficult before the conservative counter-revolution, it has become far more difficult now.  If we really care, we will stop scratching our heads, and get out there and, yes, organize.  It won't happen by itself.

Public Employees' Unions

As most New Yorkers of a certain age can recall, there's a line in Woody Allen's 1973 film, Sleeper, a comic look at a post-WWIII future, in which the character he portrays explains what happened with the line, "a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead."  It is ironic that the man who, in the early 1960s, saw it as his mission to wrest control of the teachers' union from radical leftists came to rule with an iron hand over the largest and one of the most fearsome union locals in the A.F. of L. -C.I.O.  Actually, a law known as the Feinberg Law had done most of Shanker's work for him.  In 1952, the Supreme Court upheld the law, which was designed to prohibit communists from teaching in the New York City public schools, with dissenting justices William O. Douglas, Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter asserting that the decision ""turns the school system into a spying project." (Cf. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/supreme-court-rules-on-communist-teachers).   What likely prompted Woody Allen to pen his famous line, however, was Shanker's role in the 1968 teachers' strike, a strike that closed the New York City schools for three months and left scars that are still in evidence over forty years later.  
      One aftermath of that strike which might be considered a foreshock of Scott Walker's recent success at prohibiting teachers to participate in collective bargaining, was New York State's Taylor Law, which deprived teachers of a far more pungent right for unions--the right to strike.  (In another ironic footnote to these events, the single deciding vote for the law in the New York legislature was cast by a school teacher, Conservative Party member, Vincent Riccio.)  Without the right to strike or the right to collective bargaining, a union is no longer a union, it is at best a loosely organized professional organization.
     Shanker had always done his best to rein in the left of his organization.  The union's Delegate Assembly, which at one time had sent delegates in numbers proportional to the total on a school's staff, was reduced to two delegates per school when the DA proved too unwieldy by overriding  Shanker's opposition to its vote to have the union go on the record as opposed to the war in Vietnam.  The term of office for chapter leaders was lengthened, and, when thousands of teachers opposed the 1968 strike, the union's leadership was purged of dissidents.  Over 8,000 teachers were allowed to be "excessed," many of whom had also dissented from the union's tactics in dealing with the issue of community control.  So much for democratic unionism.  Even in a rank and file that consists of teachers, never a particularly radical bunch, after 1968 the UFT was effectively contolled by Shanker and his hand-picked loyalists who vigilantly guarded against the slightest manifestation of radicalism.  To the handful who knew Shanker's history, his affiliation with the virulently anti-communist Max Schactman socialists and his USIA connections, none of this came as a surprise.  The only militant unionists Shanker ever supported were the members of Lech Walesa's Polish Solidarity (Solidarnoc) who contributed to the end of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe.   In 1998, Shanker was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Clinton.
     The history of the United Federation of Teachers parallels the history of many unions in this country.  There is only one reason that public service employees' unions (PSEUs)continue to exist: it is not quite so easy to outsource police, teachers and fire fighters.   If they could, you can be sure, they would, especially in an era that has seen prisons and even the armed forces placed increasingly in private hands.  Though difficult to eliminate, there have been ceaseless efforts to tame the PSEUs.  Much of what gets in the media about the outrageous benefits enjoyed by the PSEUs is not only horror stories, it is just plain false.  In the UFT here in New York, for example, the city has just announced the introduction of Tier 6, the effect of which will be to see benefits gradually decline to a fraction of what the few remaining dinosaurs who entered the system fifty years ago are currently entitled to.   The work of rolling back wages and benefits has largely been done.  For the right, the only remaining task is to break the unions entirely.  It is no longer enough to use the older strategy of planting the seeds of self-destruction by ensuring that Medal of Freedom winners kept militants in check.  
  

Finally, a Tiny Fissure in the Wall of Lies

As far as most Americans can tell, world opinion is, with the single exception of Russia, otherwise unanimous on the subject of conditions in Syria.  President Hassad must go.   For listeners of National Public Radio's Sunday morning show, On the Media, however, a small fissure in the wall of lies we have been treated to managed to erupt.   (I would refer readers who wish a full account to the NPR web site where a full audiocast of the interview with Lauren Wolf of the Women Under Siege Project may be heard.)   Ms. Wolf's work with the project led her to probe more deeply into accusations made by Senator Joe Lieberman, (Israel's ambassador to the U.S. Senate), that members of the Syrian Army were raping large numbers of Syrian women.   Asked what had sent up a "red flag," Ms. Wolf stated that she began to see a pattern in the reports; they seemed remarkably similar, as if they might be coming out of a propaganda ministry rather than unbiased reports.  It seemed, she said, that "they only want us to be ctiticizing the Syrian army."   Recounting how false reports led us into the disatrous war with Iraq, she felt an obligation to verify the charges made by Senator Lieberman.  It so happened that the NPR broadcast coincided with the New York Times report on President Hassad's speech to his parliament.  Although it seems almost dangerous to commit this thought to print in the climate that prevails in this country, I find that Hassad's representation of the treatment his regime is receiving from the American-led campaign against him is essentially accurate:

"...some people went as far as denying the existence of the foreign factor altogether and considered this argument an escape from internal obligations. They argued that the gist of the problem a disagreement between Syrian parties and that what is happening on the ground is a purely peaceful movement and that the source of any violence is the state. Some people made this argument in malice and bad faith and others made it with naivety, lack of knowledge, and as a result of media  forgeries. Now, and after more than a year from the beginning of these events, things are clearer and masks have been lifted. The international role in what is happening is already well-known not only for decades, but for centuries past. And I don't think it's going to change in the foreseeable future. Colonialism is still colonialism. It only changed in terms of methods and ways of  attack."                                                            
    On the subject of whether or not anti-government activities have taken the form of peaceful protests, the Western press seems unconcerned about contradicting itself almost daily.  While on the one hand having presented a scenario in which innocent protesters have been massacred by the Syrian army, it concurrently publishes numerous reports of the U.S. and its allies arming the "resistance," and of armed conflict occurring in many of Syria's population centers.  There are frequent threats of a military intervention similar to that Nato (the U.S.) employed in Libya.  Even the French, only recently seen as bad boys unwilling to join the "coalition of the willing,"  have threatened military intervention.  Someone finally succeeded in placing a pod beneath France's bed, it seems.  It is obvious that the U.S. has persuaded its allies that it will tolerate nothing less than unanimity next time around.
     Of course, anyone who focuses on the contradictory pronouncements made by those who are clearly seeking "regime change" in Syria is placed in the position of appearing to defend dictatorship over democracy.  One need not, however, be exactly an admirer of Assad to be appalled by the gross intervention in the affairs of sovereign states.  The late Bush administration's brazen broadcasting in its official statement of U.S. foreign policy its self-appointed right to pre-emptively attack any and all of its perceived enemies without regard for sovereignty only brought into the light of day a policy which the U.S. has long followed somewhat more covertly.
     Even so, not since the era of Yellow Journalism has there been more unbridled saber rattling than over Syria.  The campaign to pacify and bring under the U.S.-Israeli "peace umbrella" the swath of Muslim nations that stretches from Tunisia to China, coyly labeled the Arab Spring, has for now, beyond its ultimate goal of a Pax Americana for the entire globe, the shorter term goal of isolating and conquering Iran, seen as the major obstacle to the U.S.'s plan.