Brick Laying

there was never a more romantic moment

A few decades ago, probably about the same moment that Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights bill, people in the shadows started building a step by step agenda to somehow return America to a fantasy golden past where everything was, in some vague way, perfect.  You can view this past in any number of Hollywood movies.  I'd suggest, for starters, Picnic.  And William Holden?  He's the future, and the embodiment of all that the shadowy right wingers wanted to hold back, or turn back, or destroy. 

Flash forward to today.  Here's a link:

http://whbl.com/news/articles/2011/aug/15/wis-largest-teachers-union-plans-on-laying-off-40-of-staff-members/

[A lot of my links you have to copy and paste into your browser, sorry.]

It's a small bit of news, just a little local story.  Teacher union in Wisconsin lays off staff.  It's just one more brick in the wall.  For all of the bad press, for all of the recalls, for all of the outraged public turnout in Wisconsin, the attack on unions there is working.  This little event, the layoffs, is a victory for the Kochs, for Governor Walker, for all those once shadowy people who started work on this way back when.  (And by the way, in North Carolina we were way way ahead of this particular curve, passing a "right to work" law way back in the '50s which has kept union strength at a minimum in NC ever since.  There's talk of union boycotts of next years Democratic Convention because it's meeting in Charlotte.  Nice move, Mr. Obama. 

It's sad that too many progressive minded folks just think they need to engage with the political every now and then, such as when a promising black candidate happens to be running against a doddering senator and his crazy-lady veep candidate.  All these little bricks add up.  Before you know it, you get a bridge all the way to President Rick Perry, and his landslide Congress supporters.  My guess is, there are still way more than a majority of American voters who do not want a return to the world of the '30s.  Only in the movies were hobos as romantic as a young William Holden.  And there was never anything romantic about bringing out the tanks against strikers.  Nor, for that matter, about strikes themselves--a gutwrenching last resort response to working conditions which the owner elite thought were merely what was needed to make a profit.  Complain about working conditions?  No problem, somebody else will take your job.  Mr. Perry has called for an end to all regulations, on the grounds that they are job-killers, one and all.  Get out the peach crate, lil sis needs it to stand on so's she can reach the levers on the machine. 

I read the other day that Mississippi is now being touted as an alternative labor market to China, that workers in Mississippi will now go to work for a wage only 30% above wages in China.  That's one plan for bringing jobs back to America.  It's Rick Perry's plan, long term.  It's the Koch plan, long term.  It's the iron will of owners who see their labor component as just one lump of coal, interchangeable with any other, a part of the process to be combusted towards the result: shiny products that pop out the other end of the building, one after the other.  For a good long time American government has held that vision at bay, because unions were strong enough to gain the ear of government, and because strikes and even bloodshed were too wrenching to the community to remain the solution to impossible working conditions. 

The people in the shadows did not agree, never agreed, toiled night and day to find new solutions to their problem, and today are succeeding.  That's what's happening. 

The Balance Thing

from Digby

David Gregory: You know, Perry talked about potentially seceding from the union. You think that's extreme. Well people on the other side think that introducing health care reform for the whole country is akin to European Socialism.

The quote comes from Digby, and was made on Meet the Press yesterday.  It illustrates pretty well why Americans who simply watch the occasional Sunday opinion show to find out what's going on remain in a state of confusion or even decide they'd better go to the next Tea Party rally to make their voice heard.  What Mr. Gregory did in that quote was to suggest that secession and a flawed but needed reform of the American health care system are pretty much equivalent, because there are people who think that's so.  In the same way, the idea that in the recent Republican created debt ceiling crisis it was actually both parties who were causing the crisis and endangering the economy and the well-being of millions of Americans is pretty much what Americans now think--because that's how it was reported, pretty much.

The American tragedy is that essential to a working democracy is an informed voting public.  A vibrant journalism is essential for an informed public.  But weaknesses in our system have now allowed a Lord Haw Haw media to develop and blossom over the past thirty so years, unchecked, and even in less doctrine driven media outlets (such as David Gregory's), the balance muddle in fact distorts the truth of our political situation.

As someone pointed out over the weekend, the best President we could elect in 2008 was an Eisenhower Republican.  All the Republican candidates running against him next year assert that Mr. Obama is a radical socialist, and some even hint that he isn't even an American.  This state of affairs is extremely dangerous to the future of America.  As Digby also pointed out recently, some people saw Governor Rick Perry's execution of an innocent man as a positive character trait.  "It takes balls to execute an innocent man," a constituent is reported to have remarked at the time.  (And Bill Clinton, let us recall, pretty much made his chops the same way in 1992, as did George W. Bush in 2000.)  Meanwhile, the practical result of our more and more militarized foreign policy is permanent war, and in that regard both our major parties can be called simply "The War Party."  You doubt?  Mr. Gates.  QED. 

Tuesday morning update:
It's not like the Ayn Rand Cult has utterly eaten the brains of all our "job creators."  Warren Buffet offered this in the New York Times recently.  It's worth a read, if only for the statistics about jobs created in more taxing eras. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html?src=me&ref=general

LOW-EL LOW-EL as the kids say

http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2011/08/13/corndog-libel/

Maybe they'll just leave Tina Brown alone now.  It's the least they can do.  

Update: of course the Rude Pundit would have even more on this significant story which as usual has been left mostly uncovered by the main stream media.  And heck, might as well have some fun, since we're heading for President Rick Perry, who is going to make America and the world totally forget the Worst President, George W. Bush.

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2011/08/giving-people-what-they-want-ten-things.html

The Seals

chinook-helicopter.com

Riding to work Monday I learned that to become a member of Seal Team 6 requires at least 5 years of training over and above all the training a person has already received to become a capable member of the military, and that even people who have already become Seals frequently wash out of the program which leads to Team 6 qualification.  There were also stories available everywhere concerning the remarkable individuals who made up the group killed in the Chinook crash--people who knew them told of their leadership qualities, their focus and desire.  Some wanted to be Seals from early childhood.  All seemed to be exemplary Americans.

I have to wonder why in the world anyone thought it was a good idea to pack twenty-two of these highly skilled "resources" into a closely packed target and run them into enemy territory?  This seem like a fundamental mistake of all combat--never bunch up, because a group is a bigger and better target.  Read Captain Dick Winters' story in Holland, in World War II.  He killed some fifty German soldiers with a rifle because they huddled together in a small group.  Isn't this simply basic in our high-tech modern military?  And worse, is this a symptom of the too many terribly long years our people have been at this Afganistan War? A question for later on I guess, and another feature of our Presidential inertia, which may in historical terms be the overarching feature of the Obama years.

And as a minor footnote--and because I've given Brad Keslowski a hard time for appropriating the American flag in his post race celebrations--cudos to his guts last weekend, and a tip of the hat to his obvious sincerity concerning the loss of the Seals.  Maybe we should all see his flag-waving as a genuine salute to the young soldiers who labor on, and thank him for reminding us that their labor continues, even in obscurity.  As in all war, it seems like the gruesome absurdity is always ignored at the start, but becomes more and more apparent as time passes.  I do not understand why we (and the rest of humankind) do not learn this age-old lesson, which is written in blood across the sky.  Mr. Bush's shocking amnesia was one of his most remarkable features to me, back when he cranked up these two wars, a gigantic and open-ended commitment in response to Mr. bin Laden's audacious political theatre of blood.  Historical perspective vanished on September 12, 2001.  Vietnam was no more, not to mention Inchon, Iwo Jima, Gallipoli, Paschendale.  Oh, I forgot.  Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg.

The deal is, courage and valor and bravery are tragically honorable human qualities, and perhaps the more so for being so frequently enlisted in the dimmest of larger causes.  Reckon we'll ever manage to elect politicians who get this?  It seems more and more doubtful, doesn't it.  Even after eight years of the obvious, the current crop trudge on and on, in the same bloody footsteps.  Like my old fiddling buddy says, "we're just primates muddling through."  There's way too much wasted in our American adventure.