Every Man an Island

This will go in the books as a very bad week for the Romney campaign.

Not that it was any surprise to hear Mitt describe nearly half of all Americans as tax scofflaws who feel entitled to government support; this is a standard GOP trope, red meat for the party faithful and fat wallet donors, and it goes hand in glove with the laughable notion that wealthy people are beleaguered by excessive government regulation and exorbitant tax rates.

You see, it’s the rich who have a gripe about the terrible state this country is in, not the working class or the poor.

Voters can’t know Romney for a couple of reasons, the first being that the more of himself Romney exposes, the less voters like him, and second because he spends an inordinate amount of time on the campaign trail trying to distance himself from past statements and positions: I was against (fill in the blank) until I was for it, but now I’m against it because Obama is for it, but if Obama should change his mind, I will change mine.”

Hardly a profile in courage or conviction.

We have a fair sense of what Romney is against, but less clear is what he stands for and depends on the audience he’s addressing at any given time. On the one hand he seems to believe that America desperately needs a larger military and an even more bellicose foreign policy, and that America is duty-bound to agree with anything Benjamin Netanyahu says. America, according to some Romney statements, needs to be tougher and less apologetic in its dealings with the rest of the world, excluding Israel, of course. Under Romney, tiny Israel will continue to dictate American policy in the Middle East.

On the domestic front, all Romney offers is the tried and true Republican formula: more tax cuts, less regulation, more charter schools, less science, more religious nonsense in the public realm, more self-reliance, and, above all, blind faith in the free market. In Romney’s world view, there are producers and parasites, winners and losers, strong and weak; the old adage that no man is an island is flipped on its head so that every man (woman and child, too) is an island, and if he can’t walk the path of the rugged individualist on his own two feet, he has no one to blame but himself.

This is the same atavistic fantasy the GOP has advocated since Newt Gingrich rose from the muck to become Speaker of the House.

I suppose credit should be given Mitt for trying to pass himself off as one of us, a regular Joe, even though he flops every time. Mitt simply has no common touch, no capacity to connect with people other than those of his own rarified class, and he obviously finds mingling with the commoners distasteful. 

Thus far, Campaign 2012 has been dreadful, a grotesque parody of what democracy should look like, and the scripted-in-advance “debates” with their pre-approved questions are yet to come. Both camps will lie, spin, exaggerate, obfuscate and make outrageous claims about the other. The American media will treat each debate like the Superbowl, analyzing the style and tone while ignoring the content. Who got the debate “bounce” is the only question that will matter.

Welcome to the island.

The Forbidden Forest

In North Carolina last week, Bill Clinton made the Democrats swoon and long for the good old days when the economy hummed and the federal budget boasted a surplus, and the most pressing national question was whether or not Clinton lied about an Oval Office dalliance with an intern.

The passage of years hasn’t diminished Clinton’s silver tongue and down home charm – he can still cast a spell on an audience, make them forget history, believe in fairy tales.  

My wife watched Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention; I listened from another part of the house. While appreciative of Bubba’s oratorical flair, I couldn’t forget the inconvenient truth that it was “New Democrat” Bill Clinton who supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, ended “welfare as we know it,” signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and dismantled the Glass-Steagall act, effectively eliminating the firewall between investment and commercial banking and ushering in an era of reckless and unaccountable financial deregulation that would culminate less than a decade later in an economic nosedive nearly as severe as the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

Clinton planted the seeds and George W. Bush nurtured them, and now, twelve years on, ordinary people who work for their living find themselves standing outside a forbidden forest, surrounded by high fences topped with razor wire and No Trespassing, Keep Out signs posted every ten yards. Trespassers Beware. On the far side of the forest a better future awaits, but only a select few understand the ways of the forest and know a path through it.

Alchemy happens inside this forest: the wealthy get wealthier and while their influence and power grows, their accountability to their fellow citizens diminishes. Having paid handsomely for laws written in their favor, they have nothing to fear from government regulators or the legal system or the masses. They are untouchable, free to wheel, deal, scheme and steal, to force the sale of assets once owned in common at a profit, and to measure every social function or service by the price a rigged market deems it to be worth.

Life is grand on the far side of the forbidden forest.

The night after Bill Clinton energized the faithful, Barack Obama promised to lead us all to this nirvana if we only close ranks behind him and strive together. Though not as spell-binding an orator as Clinton, Obama is no slouch before the teleprompter, and his call for unity and patience and faith was momentarily appealing – like the Obama of 2008 – except when Truth reared its head and those with functioning memories remembered that this is the same Barack Obama who forsook the desires of the people who worked so hard to elect him, the people he now needs in order to defeat his rival and retain his crown.

This is the same Barack Obama who tosses his towel at the first sign of resistance from the GOP; the Obama who supported – and continues to support -- deficit reduction hysteria at a time when more government spending is needed to jump start the economy; the Obama who expanded the surveillance state; the Obama who unleashed Drone warfare; the Obama who has done precious little about climate change – the most serious issue facing the planet; the Obama who let criminal bankers off the hook; the Obama with nothing to say about the War on Drugs or the startling number of Americans incarcerated in federal or state prisons.

As it seems to every four years, the choice facing voters boils down to one between bad and worse, between the lesser of two evils, between two equally absurd and fantastic fables. The rhetorical question – are you better off now than you were four years ago -- is a false one, because on any number of fronts we are worse off, and not only because of Barack Obama. When one party in a two party system dedicates itself to negation on rigid ideological grounds, progress is impossible.

Life Support: Meditation on Organized Labor

Give the right wing credit for how skillfully it has used the long recession as a vehicle to generate envy between working people, and as a scapegoat for the financial woes ailing cities and state governments.

It takes a concerted campaign by think tanks, media outlets, political toadies and lobbyists to drive a wedge between private sector workers struggling with low wages and paltry benefits, and public sector workers with union representation, rights guaranteed in collective bargaining agreements, and humane benefit plans.

If only the American left were half as adept at planting the seed of discontent and watering it every day.

On this Labor Day I salute the right’s opportunistic genius. They artfully shifted the focus from the bankers, hedge fund managers and financial vultures who tanked our economy (with ample assistance from both political parties), and redirected it toward teachers, firefighters, police, city workers, and all the other public servants whose work keep our cities, towns and schools operating. In essence they said: ignore the CEO paid obscene bonuses to run his company into the turf, he’s a faultless hero of the American free market. Focus on the real culprits, the parasites, the overpaid, pampered public employees who live in luxury on your tax dime. Their greed is the cause of our misery, just as borrowers, not lenders, caused the housing bubble to burst. 

The forces of corporate greed, the US Chamber of Commerce, the Republican Party, and billionaires like the Koch brothers were never content to rest on their laurels. Having rendered private sector unions impotent through trade agreements and outsourcing, they turned their collective power against the only sector where unions still have a modicum of strength and political leverage. Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin is their poster boy.

Unions, private sector or public, are far from perfect. But when it comes to protecting working people from caprice, inequity and exploitation, unions are the best hope we have for achieving a modicum of workplace democracy and growing the middle class. Except by banding together, how else can workers share in the fruits of their productivity? The right excoriates and dismisses any talk of “collective” action, but that is precisely what’s needed to restore balance between the masters of capital and the laborers who build or serve.

I’m not optimistic for a resurgence of organized labor. After playing a large role in getting Barack Obama elected in 2008, union members watched as the new president turned his back on them. When workers made a stand in Wisconsin, Obama was nowhere to be seen. As happens every four years, many working people will troop to the polling place this November and vote against their own interests. Do they really believe Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have their back? Have they forgotten the Bush era, when tax cuts and less regulation were touted as the road to an “opportunity” society of plentiful jobs and higher wages? Net job growth was flat under Bush as were wages. The Ayn Rand Kool-Aid will not work for Romney any better than it did for Bush.

In this country it used to be that organized labor was at the center of the discussion of how to lift all boats on a tide of prosperity; we used to talk about expanding the economic pie, not shrinking it. The only vessels that rise today are of the luxury variety; they ride high on the water and their captains look down with disdain at the masses in their dinghies and rowboats and rubber rafts.