The Scott Walker recall fails

It’s depressing but I gather not a total surprise. I understand that they had a lot of trouble finding a candidate in the first place? Anyway, I got outta there. For the time being.

The American left hasn’t yet fully grasped that their first problem is their approach to the public. And that first involves recognizing that the public is partly responsible for its own woes.

Well, Walker did outspend the opposition by anywhere from 6-to-1 to 10-to-1, or so I read from one source. With the Kochs on his side and the new donation rules, I can believe it. And that kind of difference buys a lot of lies, implants a lot of false consciousness.

Still, you’d think people would have figured out by now that the super-rich want to eat us and that any candidate the rich support ought to be viewed as having a big “666” tattooed on his forehead.

Oh, well….

It’s a depressing result. Obama is still favored to win Wisconsin and could have helped the dem candidate’s cause, but he didn’t becoz he didn’t want to help out a pro-union dem.

Obama and Walker are kindred spirits, they’re both public union busters.

Z

The “union movement” in the US is hardly “centered around public service unions” but, rather, public service unions are the last unions that reemergent American fascism has yet to completely destroy.

Now, that destruction will be finalized at an accelerated pace.

The “negotiation” will be transformed from boss/employee to overlord/serf or, with a Romney/Walker victory in November, to master/slave.

I am once again suspicious of the results being rigged. Once again, there’s this mysterious 3 % right-at-the-margin-of-error gap between poll results, exit poll results, and final results, and once again (as always) in the Republican favor.

There’s a lot of brave faces being put on this disaster, but few I find comfort in. The only possible one that *might* (but probably won’t, given American’s massive pro-capitalist ‘it’s the only system that works’ indoctrination) is that labor sees that trade unionism–keeping capitalism intact and collective bargaining with Boss–is only a temporary patch that will not be allowed to survive once Boss is freed from regulations and can buy government to help him. Only the workers being Boss themselves (i.e., socialism) is the long-term fix.

And that, correspondingly, is a way of helping everyone.

The only other thing I would say is that the American Left’s habit of always shooting its left flank sure helped out the labor movement over the long haul, now didn’t it? Kicking out those socialists and communists sure made Mr. Boss love unions. /snark.

StewartM

I’m sure the Daily Show will be happy about this result. Now they’re less likely to see more hordes of dirty plebeians trying to recall a governor.

The “left wing” message is designed for failure. This is what Sheldon Wolin calls “managed democracy and inverted totalitarianism” in his book “Democracy Incorporated”. He cites the Archer Daniels Midland motto “the competitor is our friend and the customer is our enemy. Substitute “the other party” for “competitor” and the “active citizen” for “customer” to get the inverted version of totalitarian politics. (p 185).

Usury should be exposed. It was a Democratic congress that raised the ceiling that banks could charge for interest in 1980. It was the vote in a Democratic Congress to not allow “cramdown” of underwater mortgages that hurt everybody. It hurt the people who couldn’t pay their mortgages because they lost their jobs to further go down by losing their homes. It hurt their “responsible” neighbors who now live next to abandoned houses and saw the value of their houses plummet.

Having now lived in Montana for quite a while after living in NYC and growing up in the Midwest, I can see first hand what living in a colony looks like. We import close to 80% of our food. The coal with its fumes passes through the state on its way to China as does the lumber. No furniture factories here. But the whole country is now a colony 250 years after we got our “independence”.

We have lost the ability to make the machines that make the machines. Without tool and dye, we are nothing but a plantation.
From what I can tell the I.W.W. was formed to give a voice to workers in mines and factories, so called “unskilled” workers as opposed to the “skilled” workers of the AFL. It looks like in Wisconsin they have kept the divide between a private mechanic and a public school teacher. Stupid. We are the 99%.
But that’s what managed democracy does. It divides and so a peasant mentality prevails.

With the resounding defeat of labor in Wisconsin, we are probably going to see a return to 1880s levels of anti-labor violence. So one of the questions becomes: will a President call out the National Guard, or use the standing military, to put down strikes?

It’s hard for me to imagine that Romney would not. Obama?

Turning to the narrower effort, just what is Wisconsin going to become? Is the University going to survive? What happens when we see people fired in job lots at a whim? It is hard for me to see how violence can be avoided.

Food!

“…calling for a recall instead of a general strike after Walker stripped collective bargaining rights and cut benefits for workers, labor and Democratic leadership in the state diverted and then subverted populist energy, channeling it into an electoral process (at least one union, one very active in the occupation of the Capitol, stood apart from the electoral stupidity). Then, Barrett, an anti-labor centrist, won the Democratic primary by crushing his labor-backed opponent, Kathleen Falk…In other words, first, liberals lost a policy battle, then they failed to strike, then they lost a primary election, then they lost a general election to the most high-profile effective reactionary policy-maker in the country. The conservative beat the moderate who beat the liberal. And had Barrett won, he wouldn’t even have rolled back Walker’s agenda.

What happened?

…Obama’s policy framework is now the policy framework of the Democratic Party, liberals, and unionism. Up and down the ticket, Democrats are…associated with unpopular policies that make the lives of voters worse and show government to be an incompetent, corrupt handmaiden to big business. So they keep losing.”

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/06/wisconsin-recap-thanks-to-obama-american-left-lies-in-smoldering-wreckage.html

Had the unions struck, Obama [in order to please his masters] would have had to crush the strike and so reveal his hand. While Obama doesn’t escape untarnished, any other outcome would have been far worse for Obama…and let’s remember folks, Obama is Lord to the politically naive.

To the .1% in charge of the destruction of this country, Obama is a Godsend, truly the most useful evil they have ever had. Obama wins re-election, [I’m counting on it] and SSI goes bye bye…the Treasury notes that represent the 15% payroll taxes are burned to pay for tax cuts to the rich. All good…and hey, Clinton [now at 80 million in assets] is on board!

From Green Party candidate Jill Stein:

“For over a year now, the working people of Wisconsin have been under siege by the fossil fuel, mining, and toxic chemical corporations. Yesterday’s recall election was deeply flawed. Thousands of qualified voters were turned away from their polling places. Thousands more were told not to vote, or that election day was yet to come. The corporate media declared the election results while voters still stood in line to vote, and at a time when only the most conservative ward results were reported. Many votes were cast on electronic voting machines that are easy to manipulate because they lack a paper trail. And nearly all of the money spent in the election came from out-of-state big corporate interests. If an election like that is free and fair, then I have a nuke plant in Vermont to sell you.”

Steve Horn in “Counterpunch” http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/06/06/wisconsin-and-the-left/

What Happened to the Left?

Emma Goldman had it right when she stated, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” Labor and the left in Wisconsin committed suicide when it demobilized a legitimate grassroots movement and turned it into an electoral campaign. It has been a long, slow death.

Grassroots activists with righteous indignation gave up their agency to do that which was deemed “acceptable” to the powers that be, namely the “Union Bosses” and the Democratic Party apparatchiks. Why was a general strike never considered? Why not creative tactics to “kill the bill,” Act 10, the reason for the “Uprising” and recall to begin with? How’d this all morph into what it’s morphed into?

What’s to be done now?

An acknowledgement, at the very least, that the working-class grassroots in the majority of Wisconsin are attracted to right-wing populism. They see Madison (rightfully so, I’d argue) as an elitist, detached enclave 77 square miles surrounded by reality. Any left-leaning independent activism strategy that has any force, meaning and direction will have to see that these are people are allies in the fight, not people to scoff at as dumb, naive or absurd.

“the Wis. electorate that didn’t recall Walker also would vote for Obama by 11% pts. over Romney”

If Obama were any kind of leader at all, he’d have gone to Wisconsin. Of course, his loyalists will make up excuses why he was right not to.

Ordinary people hate other ordinary people who are doing better than them. The politics of envy isn’t about the rich, whom ordinary people almost never see, but about their neighbours.

It’s called last place aversion. See here [The Economist] and here [Scientific American].

I’m not sure if it’s a cognitive bias or some generalized neurosis but it sure strikes me as mind-bogglingly irrational.

Keeping the Joneses down …

Z

Democrats stood by and let private sector unions be crushed into oblivion, and now suddenly feel the need to fight to the proverbial death in defense of public sector unions. If there is any way in which that makes sense it certainly escapes me.

S. Brennan, public sector unions cannot strike, at least not legally. You may recall the last time they did, the outcome was rather ugly. It was the Air Traffic Controllers. Striking illegally would simply have given Walker more ammunition. For private sector unions and non-union workers to call a general strike with the economy in the sahpe it’s currently in would have been silly, and would not have been answered in any case. How well was “Occupy’s” general strike call answered?

For private sector unions and non-union workers to call a general strike with the economy in the sahpe it’s currently in would have been silly, …

You certainly don’t know history, or the history of unions.

From the Common Dreams website:

In the recall election, Walker swept Milwaukee’s suburbs by huge margins and dominated the countryside. McCabe says in 2010, “Walker carried the 10 poorest counties in the state by a 13% margin”; these counties used to be reliably Democratic. He elaborates:

“Republicans use powerful economic wedge issues to great impact. They go into rural counties and say, do you have pensions? ‘No.’ Well, you’re paying for theirs, referring to public sector workers. Do you have healthcare? ‘No.’ Well, you’re paying for theirs? Do you get wage increases? ‘No.’ Well, you’re paying for theirs.”

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/06/06-9

S Brennan; so you think the unions should have set themselves on fire in the interest of “making Obama reveal himself” by crushing the public sector unions. As best I can tell that would result in public sector unions still being totally destroyed and Obama losing in November, so I’m not sure how you think that would serve the union cause very well.

Phil; as a long time member of the IBEW and the Teamsters, I’m not inclined to get all enthused about someone’s cause when that party has stood by fecklessly and allowed my unions to become decimated. I am going to believe that they could care less about unions and are cynically using that one remaining union as a ploy to return themselves to power and I’m going to tell them to go fuck themselves. What union were you in?

And you did not answer my question. How well was the “Occupy” call for a general strike responded to?

In the interest of preempting potential schisms of the useless variety:

The “union movement” in the US is hardly “centered around public service unions” but, rather, public service unions are the last unions that reemergent American fascism has yet to completely destroy.

The latter part of that sentence, while true, hardly negates the first – it is, for all practical purposes, a distinction without a difference. Such a nuance has no “legs,” politically speaking.

(@Lisa Simeone) .From Green Party candidate Jill Stein:

..Thousands of qualified voters were turned away from their polling places. Thousands more were told not to vote, or that election day was yet to come. The corporate media declared the election results while voters still stood in line to vote, and at a time when only the most conservative ward results were reported…

(@jonst) Hey Lisa, ya think the fact that the Dems selected a guy whose initial mind as well have been: ‘me too! Only half as much’ might have had something to do with the loss? That, and the fact that the so called leader of the Dems stayed as far away as he could from the Dems in Wi?

This, too, is not an either/or proposition.

@Notorious P.A.T.

“Similarly, the White House mostly has sought to stay out of the fray in Madison, Wis., and other state capitals where Republican governors are battling public employee unions and Democratic lawmakers over collective bargaining rights. When West Wing officials discovered that the Democratic National Committee had mobilized Mr. Obama’s national network to support the protests, they angrily reined in the staff at the party headquarters.

Administration officials said they saw the events beyond Washington as distractions from the optimistic “win the future” message that Mr. Obama introduced in his State of the Union address, in which he exhorted the country to increase spending for some programs even as it cuts others so that America can “out-innovate and out-educate” its global rivals.”

Jackie Calmes, “Less Drama in White House After Staff Changes,” New York Times, March 3, 2011 at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/us/politics/04staff.html?_r=3

yes, Stewart M, I think that is largely right…

StewartM,

I’d say liberal voters also bear a large share of responsibility for what’s happened to the terms “liberal” and “progressive.” When they keep voting for faux-liberals, what’s that guy at the truck stop to think? The problem for most liberals is that at the end of even the most respectful debate, they’ve got nothing to offer but vote Team D–and as “dumb” as such voters may be, they know what that’s gotten them in recent history.

That liberals have been completely disempowered for decades, that our public discourse has been wholly bereft of their voices (discounting solid “liberal” publications like Time and WaPo), god knows calibrating the term is a challenging job. But it’d be a lot easier if the majority of liberals chose to use their activism and votes for genuinely liberal candidates. Meaning primarying neoliberals, cleanly breaking with the party.

Re: “the perception that ‘Liberals’ were beholden to ‘special interests’ (minorities, environmentalists, women, etc,” I’d say the party is clearly happy when the conversation is about wedge issues. Gay rights is the their current favorite. If they can talk about racism or sexism, they won’t have to try to talk about class warfare–a bit uncomfortable when you’ve been on the side of the Team-oligarch for the last 20 years. I mean, this is actually their “strategy”:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2067223/President-Obamas-2012-campaign-abandons-white-working-class-voters-favor-minorities-educated.html

Notorious P.A.T

The man Stewart M talked to at the truck stop might not identify as “liberal” in a 5-minute survey but clearly he (like most Americans) shares liberal goals. “Liberal” identification might be low, but look deeper at what people actually want.

Opinion polling during the 2011 debt ceiling debate says a lot. *Obama’s position, called “centrist” or even “liberal” by the Beltway punditry crowd, was **actually to the right of the position of the average REPUBLICAN voter**, let alone the average self-identified “liberal” or “moderate”. As for Boehner and crew, they were off the scale to the right.

The Overton Window is thus set by our sparring sets of rich elites. Even the ones who most advocate economic equality will consider is a full or partial rollback to the Clinton-era tax rates, not the Eisenhower ones that we actually need.

-StewartM

My views on the Wisconsin Joke on Workers:

Wisconsin a Case Study of Divide and Conquer: Money in Politics Brainwashes the Exploited

The Big Money behind Walker controlled the narrative of the recall election by framing the problem of the economy as a choice between costly, corrupt and selfish unionized state workers versus a wasteful state government attempting to streamline itself and cut costs for the taxpayer. Absent in that polarizing message by the Corporatists was their real agenda of dismantling worker’s rights at the altar of the free market, shipping jobs oversees to exploit the cheapest of labor pools. Also absent was the Corporatist’s agenda of cutting the taxes on the wealthiest of society’s elite while dismantling and privatizing social/public services. Interestingly, the only two unions that backed Walker, the fire fighters and the police, were exempted from Walker’s anti-collective bargaining law. Also of note is Obama’s absence from supporting the workers in Wisconsin. As explained in my post, Obama: Figurehead for the Corporatocracy, this betrayal should come as no surprise. Divide and conquer is a very effective strategy to destroy the workers who have been subject to indoctrination of Neoliberal policy since Ronald Reagan. The myth of the wealthy being job creators still works, and the public doesn’t have a clue about the evils of privatization. The class war continues with the wealthy effortlessly manipulating the levers of power and mainstream media to their advantage…

Bill H,

I just read your fact free reply with a fresh set of accusations…or as they say around here, ad hominem attacks. I’d take the time to refute them…regaling you with my history with the labor movement, but it’s pretty clear you know nothing about labor history or law and so my response would be pointless.

Thanks for letting me know that you serve Obama’s interests…sans any loyalty…or as we use to say in Chicago…it’s just business. But perhaps, you may want to change your brand of blog…try Kos unfiltered, or for a kewl-er menthol flavor, there is always Booman…if you need patch, how about TPM…I’m sure it’ll cut down on that anxiety.

Bill H.

As far as the recall is concerned, I favor recalls only in cases of corruption, and by that I mean clear cut breaking of the law.

Isn’t that what prosecutors are for? Why would you need an electoral recall process for recalling someone who’s obviously guilty of something?

Recalls are a great way of holding a politician’s feet to the fire on matching their pre-election rhetoric with their post-election performance. In Walker’s case, he *did not campaign for busting unions in 2010* and moreover had a pre-election reputation of being more a moderate Republican. Then he goes rightwing ballistic when in office, doing all sorts of things he did not campaign upon.

Recalls are the equivalent of returning a purchase back to the seller which doesn’t perform as advertised and getting your money back. We need more of them, on the national level, not fewer.

-StewartM

What union could have stood up to a hostile government and made standing up work? The answer, as in France, is a powerful teamsters union. In France, general protests work because truckers can and do block the roads in support of protesting students, etc.

Yes, the Teamsters were corrupt, allying with Mafia thugs to serve as muscle against corporate thugs. Democrats from Bobby Kennedy on down busted the Teamsters union. Leader after leader was jailed. Then Reagan deregulated trucking. Back in the good old days, independent truckers could and did take home $90,000 a year from working long hours. Now, it is maybe $50,000 and shrinking. Twenty five years later. Still “good money” but then the standard for “good money” outside the 1% has declined considerably.

Here in NJ, Chris Christie has made a living attacking teachers non-stop. Yes, at first he left out the cops but he has come for them now through the back door by limiting local tax revenues as his “aid” to local governments and tax payers. The direct payment of money to non-corporations and non-millionaires at first ceased and then has been restored at hugely decreased rates. Duh. Btw, in Jersey local cops are paid an average of more than $90,000 per year. That’s more than the teachers make.

Yes, it pre-dates Taft Hartley, but the last President to send in federal troops to put down a strike was a corporate Democrat, Grover Cleveland. It would not surprise me if, given the current tenor of opinion in the halls of power, if mediation supported Walker rather than the Wisconsin unions. Judges and mediators have been known to stray from the strict application of the law to suit the Republican/corporate Democratic agenda.

Notorious P.A.T.: Look at the continuance of No Teacher Left Behind, the further support of charter schools and corporate test-teaching services, and the failure to push check-off organizing legislation as anti-union steps by Obama. Some of this is plain mean spirited pay back. Teachers unions, being primarily female, supported Hillary Clinton heavily. Obama directly attacked teachers unions in an Iowa mailer during the caucus campaign.

“How Anti Labor has the Democratic Party become?
Left pushes for $10 minimum wage, but Democratic leadership balks By Mike Lillis – 06/07/12 08:40 PM ET”

That is unbelievably lame when the publisher of the freakin’ American Conservative is urging Romney to advocate raising the minimum wage to $12/hr (which would be a $9500 a year raise to a full-time minimum wage worker).

“In particular, this sort of issue might be ideal at attracting the votes of the huge white working class, considered a swing group in this particular election cycle. I suspect that someone, liberal or conservative, who currently scrapes by on $8.85 per hour working as a Wal-Mart greeter would tend to pay a great deal of attention to a presidential candidate who promised that his first act in office would be to raise that hourly wage to an even $12.00, even if rival campaign ads were endlessly denouncing that fellow as a “heartless capitalist.” Furthermore, since top Wal-Mart executives have themselves spent many years pleading for a large rise in the minimum wage, if the Wal-Mart CEO stood on the same platform and publicly endorsed the proposed plan, that candidate promise would seem just like money in the bank.”
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/would-romney-hike-the-minimum

Beowulf:

That is unbelievably lame when the publisher of the freakin’ American Conservative is urging Romney to advocate raising the minimum wage to $12/hr (which would be a $9500 a year raise to a full-time minimum wage worker)

Won’t happen. Not unless Romney grows some gonads and is willing to take on his Ayn Rand crazies, who would like to see the minimum wage abolished, not raised.

As for helping the working poor, raising the minimum wage without also going after the oligopolies would have limited effect. That’s because to whatever extent the 99 %’s buying power increases, said oligopolies would just raise their prices in lockstep. Reintroducing real competition in the market would be necessary for it to be a real help. And there’s no way in hell that either Romney or Obama is going to do *that*.

-StewartM