The Real Logic Behind Union Busting

The union busting drive that is underway in Wisconsin and elsewhere has an overarching goal: the redistribution of income to those in the $300,000 - $350,000,000+income classes.

The goal is realized in a number of ways: lowering corporate tax rates while raising middle and lower worker tax rates with cries of 'we must all shoulder the burden"; union busting which of course brings down incomes of public sector teachers, social workers, and as well those of private sector service workers; and the effect of layoffs: an abundance of dis-employed workers enters the job market, thereby "disciplining," that is, frightening those lucky enough to have jobs with layoffs for any infraction of employer demands . Disemployment of state workers means as well, cuts in social services to those in the various working classes: these cuts lower middling and lower class social wages and thus disposable incomes. The redistributions of incomes and wealth from lower and middling to the top will now run unabated. Expect to see privatization of social security programs back on the table. Tea party members and their sympathizers who are tired of "government on their backs," who want to "return to the Constitution as originally intended" etc., are either gainers from this overarching program or are duped ignoramuses. The birther movement is, of course, a convenient ally: it doesn't take much Freud to understand that worries about Obama's birthplace are really outrage at Obama's birthrace. These "worries" only delegitimate liberal-New Deal values, and ensure that banking deregulation and other policies that make for a better "business climate" (read: that redistribute incomes and wealth upward) are forthcoming. .

This is the America we are moving into as the overall long term rates of profit are falling; as key investment decisions are moving from the NYSE to Hong Kong, Singapore, and elsewhere (while the NYSE itself becomes a German subsidiary and an extension of German financial power, even as the German-led EU fades with the US); as the yen becomes a chief global currency. (See current stories in the Wall Street Journal).(Just wait until Chinese naval ships begin to patrol oil shipping lanes in Persian Gulf and Somalian waters, or Chinese military forces sett up camp in Central Asia to ensure pipeline security from the Caspian Sea to China, etc. As these signs of the diminution of American hegemony become apparent; as the squeeze on profits here accelerate while they climb in China, and we can expect some real jingoist warmongering with demands for new military spending requiring patriotic "belt tightening" by ... guess whom?

The scramble is on for the dollars earned and/or still coming here, and GOP strategy is to ensure that those dollars are heading to those at the top. The logic is there: all that is needed are a new breed of Cato Institute/Murdoch/Koch Bros. et. al.inspired politicos like Scott Walker, Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie, to put these policies into effect, and the goal is within reach. Scapegoating the unions is a first, and very major, opening round attack.

The Truth about Al Gore and the Internet

Since 2000, Al Gore has been maliciously maligned by many in the Republican Party and the media for supposedly claiming that he invented the internet. He never claimed such. What he claimed was that he was "instrumental in creating the internet." Moreover, as Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, the scientists who in fact did invent the internet note, Gore was very much instrumental in getting the internet going, and making it accessible to the world. The following two items should dispel the malicious propaganda that has spilled forth from Gore's political opponents and members of the press all to willing to destroy a man's reputation.

For Cerf and Kahn:

http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt

and see as well this excellent article by UCLA professor Phil Agre:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040603092645/commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.Al.Gore.and.the.Inte1.htm

Huffington Post article of interest:

I'm interviewed by Alan Jalon in his article, "LEONARD BERNSTEIN BOYCOTTS THE KOCH" in the Huffington Post of November 10, 2010:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allan-m-jalon/arts-lust-haunted-by-lenn_b_784392.html

On Gatrhorne-Hardy's Gerald Brenan

I have just finished a superb biography, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy's Gerald Brenan: The Interior Castle (NY: WW Norton, 1992). I first became acquainted with Brenan by reading his Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 1943, and still in press) while writing my doctoral dissertation in 1968. Now, some forty two years later, I've learned about Brenan's rich life (1894-1987) from this magnificent work. Gathorne-Hardy had at his disposal massive numbers of letters between Brenan and his friends -- many of them members of the Bloomsbury crowd -- Brenan's papers, those of his wife, Gamel, memoirs of those who knew him, plus the author's personal knowledge of Brenan, at least late in Brenan's life, that permitted him to write with great insight into his subject. Brenan had a knack for characterization. So too has his biographer, for Brenan is alive in these six hundred and four pages, and by alive I mean his inner life, his relations with others, his passions, his Spain. Made vivid too are his lovers, his wife, his friends, his era. When Brenan dies, the reader dies a little himself.

Tea Party: It Could Have Been Worse

So how did the Tea Party and its leader Sarah Palin do in this last, November 2, 2010 election? Tea Party candidates won many seats in the House of Representatives. But as regards the Senate, Sharron Angle lost; O'Donnell lost; Tancredo lost; Buck lost; looks like Miller has lost. And granted that Paul and Rubio won, nevertheless the Tea Party's expectations of taking over the Republican Party, not to mention the Republic itself, have been severely blunted. The establishment Republicans who now control the House will have to work with Democrats in order to pass legislation that business interests are demanding; otherwise they will look like obstructionists and hand Obama his second term victory in 2012. Tea Party threats to overwhelm moderate Republicans will be countered by the knowlege that Angle's and O'Donnell's promises to get rid of Social Security not only defeated them, but kept the Senate in the hands of the Democrats.

On the tragic side: among many other good congresspersons who went down was Alan Grayson. Ah the pity of it.

Rage on the Right

I recommend Sasha Abramsky's "Look Ahead in Anger" in the July 11, 2010 Chronicle of Higher Education. Abramsky argues that the rage that is fueling the Tea Party must be understood as a new example of what Hofstatdter called the "paranoid style in American politics" (see my entry of December 9, 2009), but Abramsky does not reduce the present rhetoric on the right to just another appearance of a cyclical phenomenon. The present rage is rooted in economic decline, but the present decline is not a simple recession: it will in fact endure as wealth and power are increasingly leaving the US and accumulating in China. Meanwhile Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, Gingrich, and certain leading members of the Republican establishment, paint Obama as a socialist and/or in racist language, as a deployer of an anti-American "Kenyan" ideology. Abramsky goes on to note that many American far-rightists are using an old technique, the "stab in the back" that Hitler used to portray Jews and liberals as traitors responsible for Germany's loss in the first World War, in the present moment rightists blaming Obama for the loss of wealth and power that afflicts American society. Abramsky points out that these kinds of attacks are not new: for example, the John Birch Society used them, starting in the sixties, to condemn liberals as communists boring from within American institutions to turn this country into a dictatorship. But the Birchites and other such reactionaries of that earlier period were isolated ideologically and regionally. Today they are becoming mainstream. (See Jane Mayer, "Covert Operations" in the September 22, 2010 issues of The New Yorker.) Abramsky's essay is worth reading and studying.

Audiobook

My book, Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician, is now available for downloading as an audiobook. You can purchase and download it at Amazon.com at this website or the following website:
http://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Barry%20Seldes