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;
*“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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