I’ve been scanning the headlines of the Wall Street Journal ever since my neighbor in Unit A moved out; it’s his subscription that keeps giving me access to the Bible of the corporate-set.
Anyway, for a union activist, this is kind of like reading the playbook of the Capitalist class – or at least learning some of their lingo and getting a strong sense of what excites them.
A couple of days ago, in an article about the UAW and Honda, the Journal seemed right pleased with itself when it reported that, “The moves now are helping the foreign-owned plants to lower wage scales.”
Take that in and digest it. For the Capitalist class, keeping unions out and wages for workers down – which is why Honda chose to locate a plant in Greenburg, Indiana, and get Indiana officials to give it generous tax subsidies, and than allow the company to restrict hiring to a small sliver of the state population and geographic territory – is a noble thing. Executives reap big rewards for it. That’s called rigging the game in your favor, and the Capitalist class is skilled in the practice.
Anyway, I pick up the Journal from the driveway this morning, and there’s a piece about President Bush and trade. Here’s Bush, whose tax and trade policies have shifted billions of dollars in wealth from less well-to-do Americans to the wealthiest, whose policies have created a vast gulf between haves and have-nots, chiding corporate boards for giving Top Execs lavish salaries and stock options; Bush talking about how Americans want fairness, when his Administration has been anything but.
Does Bush believe that anyone buys his shit? He’s not a lame duck, he’s a moron, a complete, fucking moron. He had no trouble denying fairness to Katrina victims or Iraq vets discharged from the Army and denied disability benefits on the basis of bogus personality disorder claims or vetoing a decent bill that gave children a shot at decent medical care.
No trouble at all. He just smacked his titanium heart with his fist and claimed that the American economy is strong, robust, cooking, full of opportunity for all.
No wonder Bush smirks so much, there’s just no way to spew that crap with a straight or serious face. You either have to smirk or grimace or burst out laughing. Bush went to Yale on his family dime, studied occasionally, partied a lot, learned little, and still, still, the motherfucker thinks he’s smarter than the rest of us.
Here’s this dingbat airhead, saying that America has lost confidence in its ability to compete in the global economy. Memo to GW: we don’t build things in this country anymore! Instead of building products the rest of the world might want to buy, we play with paper, make deals out of thin air, produce nada. And your pals in High Finance make millions, and pay to keep guys like you in the saddle, and it’s because of you, and them, that average people have finally figured out that there’s no way for them to win at this game; they realize too that they will not do as well as their parents did.
This cold knowledge is at long last beginning to sink into the nation’s TV-muddled brain, the veil of distraction is lifting as the general misery deepens: housing, health insurance, food, gas, it ain’t getting any cheaper folks, and with these jackasses in full control, there’s damn little we can do about it.
Except bitch, rant, scream and swallow anti-depressants. A few souls will see that it may take a lot more than that for us to be noticed. We can’t interest people in the ballot box, and even when we do, the powerful can steal the fucking election out from under us, stick one of their own in the White House or the Congress or the statehouse or City Hall.
Rigged games go one way. It baffles me that it took so long for the majority to catch on. I mean, did we really believe that supply-side, trickle down bullshit? Yeah, just let the rich get as rich as they possibly can, justify their belief in the creed of Ayn Rand, talk about morality and self-reliance and the sanctity of the individual, and then close their purses and forget they ever heard the term trickle down.
They turned the full power of their PR industry on us, their think tanks, encouraged, cajoled, and seduced us to buy slob SUV’s, shop for cheap goods at Wal-Mart, hate unions, and worry more about gays in our classrooms than about the organized, coordinated, and legal theft occurring right before our eyes. These fuckers are genius, genius and money, Midas on crystal meth.
They don’t even piss on us, anymore; they can’t be bothered.
Hey, it says so in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, and who am I to doubt that venerable journalistic institution?
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