Rumblings of using Wisconsin’s recall provisions to remove Republican politicians who support Walker’s attempt to remove bargaining rights from unions are going around. This is an excellent idea. Destroying the political viability of some politicians, making it so they can never run for office again, making them an object lesson is the only way to make this sort of all-out attack on basic bargaining rights less likely to happen in the future.
It won’t halt such efforts, though, because the Koch brothers and other multi-billionaires whose interests and ideology are served by reducing wages and taxes will continue to fund such efforts, and will make sure the ex-politicians are taken care of.
What will halt such efforts is destroying the people who are really behind them: oligarchs like the Koch brothers. And destroying them requires at least two things: an insistence that rich people actually be subject to the law, and that confiscatory levels of taxation be put back on the rich. 90% taxation on all income over 1 million dollars. Real taxation of corporations on their actual profits with measures put in place to tax all income, so it can’t be hidden overseas, and equally importantly, a reinstatement of the estate tax, so that 70% of estates over 5 million are taxed away. Nothing is worse for and more damaging to both real democracy and to general prosperity than high concentrations of wealth because wealth allows a few individual to buy great power. And in terms of concentration of wealth, the worst type of wealth is inherited wealth, which creates an aristocracy of individuals who did nothing to earn their power or wealth but win the lucky sperm contest. It is beyond ironic that the Koch brothers are libertarians, given that they are parasites who inherited their money.
Capitalism is a game, and games have rules. The first thing that anyone does when they “win” the game of capitalism does is they try and make sure that win is permanent by getting rid of the real free market. In a real free market, for example, banks with negative book values go bankrupt. In a real capitalist society which is functioning properly, executives who engage in widespread fraud go to jail.
Ending the market takes various forms, but one of the forms is reducing the power of other entities to bargain. Unorganized labor can’t bargain effectively. Most workers only have a bargaining position worth squat if they bargain collectively. So getting rid of collective bargaining is important. Public workers with good wages implicitly require somewhat higher taxes, as well, and less tax cuts for the rich.
Ending the market is also aided by controlling the market, and so the news out of Wisconsin, as this blogger who is on the ground details, has been extensively edited as well. Who owns the media, who the publisher is, matters hugely. At the end of the day, it’s a rare publisher whose outfit doesn’t start pushing the interests of the publisher.
If the left wants a nation they recognize, all sorts of things need to be done. Public financing of elections, overturning the money=speech provisions and breaking up the media conglomerates are high in that list. And when you increase progressive taxation radically, you’ll also get a better quality of journalists, because they won’t actually be making millions of dollars a year after tax, and so they’ll suddenly care about how ordinary people have to live, because they’ll be living like affluent ordinary people, not like rich people.
So, a recall effort is a good first start. Make an example of some Republicans. Then move on to maximal demands backed by the threat of general strikes and protests which shut down business as normal: confiscatory taxation on the rich, public financing of political campaigns, an end of speech=money, and a breakup of media oligopolies. In a war, you go after the enemy’s supply lines. Destroy the rich, or they will take everything you have, then reduce you to debt peonage, if you haven’t been so reduced already.