12 June 2012

Wisconsin: Why the Democrats (Deliberately) Lost

AFTER A WEEK of reading detailed analyses of the Wisconsin recall debacle, I will say aloud what no one else on the Left apparently dares even whisper: the Democrats were not “beaten”; they deliberately lost the fight.

When we examine what happened in Wisconsin – when we look at it from the (forbidden) perspective of class struggle – no other conclusion is possible. We need only review the associated history. Gov. Scott Walker's manifest fascism his  termination of collective bargaining and his genocidal cutbacks in government services vital to seniors, disabled people and lower-income folk in general – goaded a huge faction of the 99 Percent into rising up angry. If the Democrats were truly advocates for “change we can believe in,” they would have been overjoyed: not only was organized labor rediscovering its lost militance, the party itself was again attracting genuine radicals – the sorts of people who made the New Deal a new reality and, four decades later, gave the Civil Rights Movement the endorsement and protection of federal law. But the Democratic Party's' actual response to Wisconsin's revolutionary potential was a public succession of meaningless gestures – the bare minimum essential to keep alive (the imbecility of) “hope.” Behind the scenes, the party's top-level operatives worked overtime to co-opt, nullify and eventually destroy the community of rebellion that was (seemingly) emerging from the uprising Walker had provoked.

In truth – because the (covertly fascist) Democrats are as beholden to the One Percent as the (overtly fascist) Republicans, the Democrats were terrified by the activist solidarity that was evolving in Wisconsin, and they suppressed it accordingly. They did not use the brute force reserved for mass movements that can be denounced as rabble via the Ruling Class Media propaganda machine. Instead they employed a high-intensity mix of stealth and co-optation – strategy and tactics no doubt crafted by the same secret-police types who plotted the campaign of thuggery and infiltration that destroyed Occupy. As a consequence, Walker's 58-percent unpopularity (November 2011) became, within six short months, a 54 percent victory margin. The magnitude of Walker's funding meanwhile gave the Democrats the perfect excuse beneath which to hide their (additional) disempowerment of the 99 Percent and their malice toward organized labor in particular.

Since then any number of U.S. and European writers have detailed how the Democrats destroyed the Wisconsin Rebellion. But not one has thus far dared call the destruction by its proper name: betrayal. And that word alone, though infinitely damning, is not sufficient. For the result of this betrayal is (yet another) fascist triumph, and with it the demobilization of any segment of the Wisconsin population that might actively resist or otherwise jeopardize the methodical expansion of capitalist tyranny. As always, it's absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent; total subjugation and genocidal poverty for the rest of us – the Wall Street master-plan ever-more obviously served by Democrats and Republicans alike.

See for yourself – especially if you doubt my conclusion. Rather than attempt to condense all the Wisconsin postmortems into a summary that would of necessity eliminate their nuances, I here provide links to a representative sampling. By far the most revealing of these analyses (and therefore the most essential to my case) is Gary Younge's “There's class war in Wisconsin, yet the Democrats sing Kumbaya,” The Guardian (UK). The head tells the whole story. The text spells out the ugly details – and does so with enough clarity we can (if we are so inclined) extrapolate for ourselves the operational doctrines by which the Madison Rebellion was reduced to the Wisconsin Waterloo.

Here too by title and author is a bibliography of seven more vitally informative reports, each with its own unique perspective on the defeat, each providing another piece of the proverbial puzzle that – when assembled – gives us a panoramic object lesson in how the One Percent easily suppresses a potential revolution even when the revolutionaries have sufficient respectability to protect themselves from armored cars, pepper gas and mass arrests by truncheon-wielding thugs. The articles preceded by one asterisk are those I especially recommend; two asterisks means I consider them vital:

Accountability in Defeat: On a Whupping in Wisconsin,” Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive via Common Dreams;

**“Five Things to Consider in the Walker Recall Vote,” Robert Borosage, Campaign for America's Future (website) via Truthout, with one commentary and three rebuttals to hostile posters as my contributions to the associated discussion thread;

*“Get Left or Be Left,” Carl Gibson, original reporting for Reader Supported News;

Getting Rolled in Wisconsin,” Andy Kroll, TomDispatch.com via Common Dreams;

How Republicans Prevented Thousands of Wisconsin Students from Voting,” Scott Keyes, (with the story carefully omitting the fact the Obama Justice Department did nothing to prevent this egregious violation of the 1964 Voting Rights Act), Think Progress via Reader Supported News;

**“In Wisconsin, an Ominous Crucible of U.S. Politics,” Arun Gupta, The Guardian (U.K.) via Common Dreams, with two commentaries by me – one a pull-no-punches explanation of “what is being done to us”;

*“The Sliver Lining in Walker's Victory,” Arun Gupta and Steve Horn, misleadingly headlined but otherwise excellent original reporting for Truthout and

**“The Wisconsin Recall Aftermath,” Charles Pierce, Esquire via Reader Supported News;

The combined weight of the these disclosures make it clear the Democrats' tactics were so obviously self-defeating, not even stupidity is a plausible excuse. In the parlance of sports-gambling, the Big D threw the game. No other conclusion is possible.


*****

'Little Chance' of Victory in Wisconsin...Or in November 

One of my earliest essays on Wisconsin, “Madison's Pivotal Challenge: Finding Our Way Beyond Capitalist Greed,” published here 27 February 2011, provides something of an (eerily prophetic) backdrop to the newer material material above.

As I wrote then, almost a year and a half ago, “our national credo of infinite greed and limitless selfishness is becoming as commonplace amongst politicians and bureaucrats and even their receptionists as it is (and always has been) amongst banksters and tycoons...Indeed this signature combination of capitalist greed and Ayn Rand selfishness has become the binding unum of the e pluribus, the one anti-value that unites the many. It is now the defining characteristic of the nation as a whole. In a terrifyingly real sense, the gang-banger with the fist-sized solid-gold dollar-sign dangling from his solid gold neck-chain is the common denominator of us all.”

Greed – specifically the core ethos of Moron Nation as manifest in workers so suicidally idiotic they turn against their comrades in hatred and envy whenever those comrades successfully resist capitalist oppression – was the major factor in the Wisconsin outcome: that's how the Republicans won 38 percent of the union vote.

A week earlier in February 2011, via a piece titled with a line from an old Red Army song – “'Far & away the road goes winding; look & see how merrily the road goes'” – I correctly reported how “The revolutionary potential of the Labor Uprising that started in Wisconsin and is spreading across the nation is already terrifying the Ruling Class. Definitive proof of the extent to which the capitalist aristocracy is genuinely frightened comes from two seemingly unrelated developments. One of these is the government's decision to charge Private First Class Bradley Manning with a death-penalty crime – the intent obviously to make him an example a la Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The other development is Time magazine's publication of an anti-Marxist warning that eerily recalls the Rosenberg era...”

Thus as Madison evolved into a liberation movement, the covertly fascist Democratic Party responded accordingly, employing a variation on the tactics by which the CIA's Operation Chaos infiltrated and destroyed the old Counterculture, particularly the alternative press. First the Democrats endorsed the rebellion, then they used their endorsements to leverage infiltrators into key positions, then finally the infiltrators generated enough chaos, disinformation, divisiveness and disunity to neuter the rebellion from within.

Why? For the same reason (and essentially by the same methods) the Democrats killed Employee Free Choice and public-option/single-payer health care: each of these – the promised Wisconsin recall and the promises of “change we can believe in” – represented acts of rebellion. Each threatened not just to revitalize the labor movement but – by alleviating hopelessness and raising expectations – to resurrect anti-capitalist resistance amongst lower-income peoples, who might then join ranks with larger and more economically and politically powerful factions of the 99 Percent to build a genuinely powerful Working Class. But nothing is more horrifying to the One Percent, who believed such activism had been permanently extinguished by the political murders of the 1960s, particularly the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. Snug in now-eternal servitude to the Ruling Class, the Democrats could not abide the possibility their party might again become the vehicle of near-revolution it had been under the aegis of the New Deal. To today's Democrats, repaying their debt to Wall Street by ensuring the continued oppression of the Working Class is infinitely more important than electoral victory. Hence their record of brazen betrayals: EFC, health care...and, yes, Wisconsin.

In this dark context, the unanimous and near-unanimous Congressional votes by which the Democrats and the Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated their hostility to our (former) constitutional rights is the most revealing fact of all: to paraphrase an infamous Nazi slogan: One Percent, One Party, One Tyranny.

Which is precisely why I believe the Democrats intend to lose November's national election exactly as they lost June's Wisconsin recall: by suppressing the language of class struggle, by allowing the Republicans to divide and conquer – in either case, Wisconsin or the nation, the Democrat payoff to Wall Street. Thus will the Democrats facilitate Republican victory, performing their last remaining service to the One Percent.
(Memo to the Working Press: if you dare, probe the extent to which the events in Wisconsin were investigated by the Department of Homeland Security and all the rest of the Ruling Class equivalent of SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency included. My bet is the Gestapo types were out from the first days of the demonstrations in Madison – with direct lines both to the White House and the main mansion of the Koch Brothers.)

Such is realpolitik on the Big Plantation of the post-American Dream, post-constitutional United Estates.


*****


Wisconsin Recall: Another Charade to Ensure We Remain Sedated 

Wisconsin is also (yet more) additional proof of what I have come to think of as the Bill Moyers theorem: that for many years now – I would say since the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy – U.S. politics have been nothing but a charade carefully scripted by the One Percent and acted out by the two parties.

As Moyers says, the real decisions are now always made behind closed doors, in the star chambers of the Ruling Class and the privy councils of the politicians who impose their increasingly despotic will.

The purpose of the deception is not just to conceal the reality of plutocratic tyranny; it is also to Big Lie us into submission, convincing us the American Experiment in constitutional democracy is functioning as the Founders intended and the American Dream therefore lives on – never mind the contrary evidence increasingly provided by our five senses. 

It astounds me so few people understand what is being done to us – especially after the Moyers disclosure, which verbalized an ugly truth the working press has known since the 1970s but none of us dared reveal lest in retaliation we be forever banished from journalism.

Perhaps the reason the Democrats' role in this process is so difficult for so many to understand is too few of us are hunters anymore. The sustaining service the Democrats provide U.S. electoral politics is exactly analogous to the function of decoys in duck hunting: just as the decoys convince the ducks all is well, bringing them into shotgun range and luring them to their eventual doom in the hunter's oven, so do the Democrats reassure us, herding us into helplessly passive acquiescence to the non-alternatives provided by our hopelessly corrupted voting booths and positioning us within easy reach of the Republican genocide invariably facilitated by Democrat “cave-ins”: permanent joblessness, bankruptcy, foreclosure, eviction, homelessness, unrelieved hunger, untreated sickness, termination of Medicare and Medicaid, unsurvivable reductions in Social Security, death.

Thus the Ruling Class intends to achieve its final self-serving objective: radical reduction of the global population, forcible shrinkage of the 99 Percent to exclude all of us who are no longer profitable as slaves.

LB/10 June 2012
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