Our Carnival Barker of a State Senator

This is what Washington County decided would be a better representative in Madison than the  respectable and mentally stable Tanya Lohr.

The wit and wisdom of Glenn Grothman

On the good old days: "Homosexuality was not on anybody's radar. And that's a good thing." (As quoted in The Capital Times, Feb. 11, 2010)

On government waste: "I've interviewed over a dozen people who check out people who pay with food stamps and all felt people on food stamps ate better - or at least more costly - than they did." (Grothman opinion column, April 14, 2004)...

On holidays: "Hallmark sells Kwanzaa cards. The Post Office sells Kwanzaa stamps. The rest of us should treat Kwanzaa with the contempt it deserves before it becomes a permanent part of our culture." (Opinion column, Dec. 9, 2003)

On the threat to America: "In this country, can we continue to exist if we have a government that is actively discouraging businesses from hiring men? Our country is not going to survive if we continue this war on men." (Tea Party speech, Aug. 7, 2010)

On the UW-Madison: "There are all sorts of people who are conservatives who want to be history professors or journalism professors and they're scared to death they won't get tenure because people on the other end of State Street don't want to hear the truth." (Remarks at "Rally for Marriage" rally, July 28, 2010)

On the UW's diversity mandates: "Does the university hate white men?" (Press release, March 5, 2009)

On stem-cell research: "Some people enjoy creating babies to experiment on, but I don't." (As quoted in Isthmus, Jan. 21, 2011)

 

--Lincoln Log

 

Source: The Isthmus Daily Page 03-03-11

Chattanooga Blues

Wow, just wow. Workers at a Chattanooga, TN Volkswagen plant voted 712 to 626 against joining the United Auto Workers with 89% participation. Once again the South proves it does not have a clue. This was an historic vote as no foreign-owned auto assembly plant in the South has union representation. Not that labor historians will be surprised. Being a US labor historian is well, a rather lousy job. Not that the two members of that profession I have known personally let it show, but I am sure I would be swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills if my job was to research, write about, and teach the sordid, dismal history of working people in our supposedly free country. Contemporary union organizing rarely even reaches the stage where the workers need to be intimidated and frightened into voting against their own interests. American individualism and self-centered ignorance have always meant that the bosses win.

Oh? You say, what about the New Deal years? Those were pretty good years for working people, as it is almost catechism in American history that post WWII saw the greatest middle class ever emerge in this country. Yes, that is true but it was basically a truce between labor and management. The company gained relative labor peace, the workers gained wages that rose beyond simple subsistence and health care, pension, and other benefits. The treaty of Detroit that basically started these civilizing tendencies also laid the groundwork for today's plutocratic, plantation economy. What workers were unable to secure was a meaningful voice in management. Meaning that what was conceded could easily be taken away once conditions changed.

Thirty years of Neoliberal business rule in Washington, and management's dreams have come true. The peasants are back in line, profits and executive pay have skyrocketed, as has inequality.

Off to a great start for Black History Month

A private school for girls in Concord, CA decided it would be a good idea to serve fried chicken and watermelon, and outrage ensued. Or something...

Maybe it is because I am a sea monster of the Caucasian variety, but that incident doesn't get to me the way seeing tea baggers with pictures of nooses around the president's neck. One of my tank commanders in the Army, a black guy from Mississippi, asked me once if I liked fried chicken and watermelons and I just said "uh, yeah." I still puzzle over that incident in my mind but really cannot speculate on what he was trying to do or prove. This was a smart guy, not like Bubba in Forrest Gump.Was he somehow testing me for racism? But that was the only time I had heard that expression in a racial setting.

Personally, I think we can retire that particular phrase as some kind of racial epithet. After all, who doesn't like fried chicken? So why does this particular meal earn a tag of "controversial" when say, pasties in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or fish tacos in San Diego do not?

So what do fried chicken, cornbread, and watermelon have in common? Answer: it is a pragmatic, practical bag lunch for field workers. African American men often worked as field hands even after emancipation. First, fried chicken is fairly easy to prepare in predawn days before electric lights. You do not need utensils to eat it, and when wrapped in a kitchen towel it stays hot until lunchtime. Cornbread has similar attributes. Watermelon, well juice boxes or the thermos had not been invented yet so a slice of melon was a cool, refreshing, and tasty alternative to water.

Anyway, the history of African American cuisine is full of resourceful adaptation to scarcity or harsh conditions. Take barbeque, while not invented by slaves, it was a method of rendering 'Massa's' leftovers edible; voila, ribs. But racism is stupid, it should have died a long time ago. We will probably find a cure for cancer sooner than one for stupid though.

PS. A lot of Yoopers are descended from Cornish immigrants who were miners in the old country. Pasties are likewise descended from the traditional hand pies of that region. And, just like chicken you can bring pasties down into the mine with you for lunch.

Dependency Part Two: Origins

A few words on how I decided to write about the subject of public and private dependency. My research has found me studying a lot of American history, all of it in fact. But second on the list is Medieval European history and finally Ancient Roman history. Hegemonic empires interest me, but the decline of those hegemons and what happens after is what really enflames my passion. What goes wrong with the international order? What waits in the wings to pick up the pieces? What steps do leaders and the population take to try and stem the tide of decline? It may be straying into anthropology and/or sociology to inquire about popular perceptions of social problems, but if there is even a drop of democracy left in this country then what people believe is important in shaping tomorrow's policies. Our perceptions are influenced by so many sources, and only a precious few are helpful or even benign. Malicious influences that twist history to serve special interests should make everyone angry, who enjoys being manipulated anyway?

I first read Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford History of the United States) as an undergrad for oddly enough, a class on the Civil War era. It is huge, it is comprehensive, it is a compelling read. But the first time through I did not make the connection that occurred recently when I listened to Battle Cry on audio. In an early chapter McPherson concisely described what dependency meant to Americans of the early republic. Please forgive that I do not have page numbers or direct quotes, that is just the nature of audiobooks.

When the founders envisioned the American Republic dependency was very much on their minds. Thomas Jefferson may have been the most articulate spokesman for republican virtue, but versions of what that virtue entailed was widely shared by the founders. What went wrong with republics of the past, and how the American experiment could stand the test of time was a chief concern of our early leaders. The Roman republic and its history was well known to educated men of the 18th Century who could read Latin. What sullied republican virtue in Rome to the founders was dependency in the form of patron/client relationships. Slaves to masters, renters to landlords, soldiers to their generals, and so on privatized power in Rome and changed loyalties from the public interest to private interests. Jefferson especially felt that success for America lay in creating and preserving the nation of yeomen family farms, and independent artisans and merchants. Owning land is the key to independence, small self-sufficient farms were free from the coercion that landlords or employers could exert for political influence.

Dependency on others who could and frequently did manipulate their clients to vote against their best interests was worrisome. What about the founders themselves? So many of the founders were slave owning tobacco planters, who were they dependent upon? It is an uncomfortable truth that the unsettled land for yeomen and leisure time for gentlemen was bought with the blood, sweat, and tears of Native Americans and enslaved Africans, but a truth that must be confronted. It is enough here to state that our republic was born from genocide that made land available and slave labor that gave planters leisure sufficient to think and study. In a word though, it was debt that compromised independence among the planter class. In his classic study T. H. Breen examined the mentality of our founders in Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution.

Hmm, debt and working for someone else are bad for a healthy republic. Is a republic of laws and not men still our goal? Can the majority of Americans just struggling to maintain stability and the necessities of life find enough energy and will to reverse our decline? Is there any hope of reversing the oligarchic and authoritarian trends in our corporate republic? If anyone reading this has comments, questions, corrections, or other criticism I welcome it.

Dependency Part One: Slavery

A history lesson for all the tea partiers, authoritarians, and dupes of the right-wing media entertainment complex. I know how hard you guys try to discern the intent of the Founders without ever opening a book with, you know, actual words they wrote. I have news for you, this "government dependency" you all seem so concerned about is almost exactly the opposite of what Americans of the early republic were concerned with. The public assistance programs that exist in the US, already some of the stingiest in the industrialized world, have been under attack for decades now. What is the excuse this week? "Welfare" is a dirty word, and words like "lazy" or "parasite" inevitably precedes any mention of the poor people using any sort of public assistance. And this is before we get to any of the more vulgar racial characterizations. The trouble is, public assistance programs are actually providing a cushion against what the founders really worried about, private dependency.

One of the sad truths about human history is that most people, most of the time are dependent on another person for their lives and livelihood. Most of history is the story of the majority held in a state of unfreedom to one degree or another. The sociologist Michel Foucault differentiated "power" from the concept of "power over" where the former is the ability to force someone to do something against their will, while the latter binds a subordinate to his master through the provision of something important that can be revoked. Slavery, the most apparent form of unfreedom, was defended prior to the Civil War as a symbiotic relationship where the master provided for the slave's welfare. Planters imagined themselves as benevolent patriarchs with their slaves dependent upon them for all their needs. This fantasy led most Southern whites to foresee the extinction of freedmen after the war because "obviously" blacks cannot take care of themselves and will starve without coercion to work. However, like so many right-wing fantasies, this was exactly the opposite. Slavery was a simple power relationship, withhold the lash and the master had no actual power over the slave. In fact it was the masters who were dependent on their slaves, and much of Southern history since Emancipation has been the attempts of landowners to bind workers to themselves.

Sharecropping, convict lease systems, vagrancy, black codes, labor contracts, and Jim Crow segregation were all attempts by Southern whites to create a 'power over' situation with African-Americans which would be exploited. For good measure, the whites projected the words "lazy" and "parasite" onto their former slaves to perpetuate their preferred stereotypes. What a surprise that former slaves might be unenthusiastic about working for their former masters, even through generations. Then we have the criminal stereotype. It should be self-evident that people sentenced to a life of hard labor and inadequate provisions through no fault of their own might not feel too badly about stealing from their oppressors.

With these historical concepts in mind, it is easy to see why prejudice against African-Americans is so all-pervasive on the right. African-Americans are an easily differentiated minority that refuses to submit to oppression. That makes African-Americans an obvious out-group with cultural values inconsistent with the majority's. Yes, I said it; to participate in the corporate capitalist system is to internalize dependency. Your livelihood depends on the whim of others to whom your best interests are likely not of prime concern, other things like bonuses and profit margins take precedence over whether you have a job. Public assistance programs that prevent you from starving if the whim of your masters finds you out on the street are a threat to maintaining a "power over" relationship between bourgeois and proletariat for lack of better terms. It sure is convenient that the propaganda of masters lines up so neatly with the prejudices of right-wingers, isn't it?

David Brooks and the Jumping of Sharks.

It is not every day that a genuine social problem enters the American political discourse. In the 1930s the public and the government discovered that unregulated capitalism and wild financial speculation with depositor's money was a bad thing, and took great steps to rein in excesses. In the 1960s the public similarly decided it was time for the South to grow up and start treating African Americans like human beings. In the 1970s popular pressure encouraged Richard Nixon of all people to work with other Republicans, and Democrats to form the Environmental Protection Agency and other laws to curb pollution. Sometimes the stars align, critical mass forms and what was once simply discussion among intellectuals turns into actual policy with strong popular support. Occasionally we get it really wrong, drugs and terrorism come to mind, but there are real world examples when democracy functions and good policies emerge to combat social problems.

We may be approaching this point on income inequality. Slowly, belatedly, and against incredible opposition it is finally reaching the broad public mind that maybe having 85 people with the same wealth as the bottom half of the human race is not conducive to a good situation. Oxfam's executive director put it rather bluntly:

Without a concerted effort to tackle inequality, the cascade of privilege and of disadvantage will continue down the generations. We will soon live in a world where equality of opportunity is just a dream. In too many countries economic growth already amounts to little more than a ‘winner takes all’ windfall for the richest.

If you are reading this post I probably do not need to spend more time making the case that inequality of wealth and income are bad for most people, or society in general. But briefly, when too much wealth is concentrated at the top, the rich can bid the price of necessities up and out of reach for the rest of us. They can also corrupt the political process with money and when all else fails hire strong men with guns to intimidate, beat up, or kill anyone who disagrees.

Leaders shape opinion to some degree in any situation. During the American Revolution pamphlets written by very smart men were passed around and discussed at taverns all over the colonies. Some ideas were accepted, others rejected, and still more changed through debate and compromise. While you may be hard-pressed to find serious political discussion in American watering holes today, this process still exists. And here is where David Brooks enters, finally. I know I'm a little tardy in writing about a column from January 16th and I apologize but this is a debate long overdue in America and is an ongoing discussion that will likely last longer than a few news cycles. In short, this New York Times Op-Ed writer who makes an ungainly number of appearances on Sunday talk shows to represent the "respectable" conservative position is not the opinion leader we need right now.

In The Inequality Problem Brooks leverages every ounce of his mainstream respectability to misdirect and mislead his readers on the title subject. From the first line: "Suddenly the whole world is talking about income inequality." Brooks turns reality on it's head. No Davey, this did not happen "suddenly," nor is inequality "lump[ing] together different issues that are not especially related." You may recall the champion of private equity and GOP standard-bearer Mitt Romney stating that inequality is something people should discuss only in private, and in dimly-lit rooms. Or that a few protestors made a little noise in Seattle during the WTO's 1999 meeting in that city to voice their concerns that a few unelected corporations should not be able to reorder society along plutocratic lines. Thank goodness George W. Bush came along to put inequality on the back burner by making war, torture, wire-tapping, and general tyrannical behavior the prime concerns of activists, but that does not mean inequality somehow disappeared from 2001 to today.

As the blogger Driftglass succinctly put it:

For the record, without too much effort, any competent citizen from Paul Krugman to my sainted mother can incinerate Mr. Brooks' increasingly frantic and transparent attempt to decouple 30 years of aggressively pro-plutocrat, anti-labor, anti-equality policies of the Right from any discussion of income inequality...

 

...which is so much of out mainstream is devoted to keeping fragile Conservatives like Mr. Brooks as carefully protected and climate-controlled as any hothouse orchid, and the Hell away from competent citizens. [emphasis mine]

Driftglass further ridicules the pompous and insulated Brooks' argument as irrelevant misdirection by summarizing the rest of The Inequality Problem as " Look over here!  Look over here! -- please for God's sake lets get back to talking about unwed teenage mothers and stuff." Yup, that is pretty much all he has, roll out the usual "blame the victim" tripe that poor people are poor because they are lazy and spend too much time having unprotected, out of wedlock sex. Ben Cohen at The Daily Banter also summarized Brooks' position as "divid[ing] the world into responsible rich people and irresponsible poor people, and postulates that inequality has nothing to do with the wealthy rigging the economy to maintain their wealth, but more to do with failed policies towards poor people, who just breed and won’t work." Since it is poor peoples' own fault, raising the minimum wage or other policies will not help and the responsible aristocrats like Brooks can wave it away without evidence. David Brooks represents the respectable mainstream arm of the conservative media complex, like his fellow shills for the rich on fox news or talk radio he is well paid to muddy the waters and present reasonable doubt against common sense. Leave no stone unturned, no rhetorical device unused, and no logical fallacy unfoisted to protect profit margins.

Cohen cites a further analysis and refutation of the "respectable" position by Robert Reich, an intellectual who combines empathy, erudition, education, with the empirically obvious plight of the increasingly poor working class of America. After reciting well-established facts about inequality, Professor Reich hits on the biggest of the gaping holes in Brooks' argument. In a display of stunning ignorance, Brooks states without irony that we cannot allow class-consciousness enter the debate on income inequality, because: "America has always done better, liberals have always done better, when we are all focused on opportunity and mobility, not inequality, on individual and family aspiration, not class-consciousness." In other words, yes the poor are a problem but talking about inequality "needlessly polarizes the debate [emphasis in original]" Not to put too fine a point on it, but has Brooks ever left his comfy little bubble? America is utterly, and intractably, polarized. For crying out loud, there are people freaking out that Coke ran an ad where America the beautiful was sung in languages other than English. Influential conservatives regularly call for impeachment and armed rebellion against a twice elected president. Everything from chicken sandwiches to Duck Dynasty has been thoroughly politicized. If ever Noam Chomsky's thesis that only one side is waging the class war was made apparent, this is it.

Ben Cohen followed up his analysis of David Brooks and whether conservatives really hate the poor by presenting, with referencing links and context, five examples of Brooks' unending class-consciousness and polarizing language in the defense of the rich. In this debate, we have great examples of confusing correlation and causation, lies of omission, framing devices, and wealth apologia. The debate on income inequality also shows how the discussions which used to be held in taverns have migrated to cyberspace. Not a moment too soon has the internet allowed the commoners to challenge the lords and their heralds. This might be our last chance to have this debate too, as well as our last chance to preserve some small space for popular participation in the business of state.

"Jumping the shark" has become a euphemism for television programs that have run out of ideas. It refers to an episode of Happy Days when Fonzie proved once again to be the coolest guy around by water skiing and jumping over shark infested waters, or something to that effect. It was too much for the audience and most people point to that moment of Fonzie in the air wearing his leather jacket and swim trunks as when Happy Days went over the edge of cool. One can only hope that David Brooks' breathless defense of wealth and concurrent condemnation of the poor has finally jumped the shark on our indefensible system of corporate personhood and human commodification.