Anti-union rhetoric is at a high point, with Fox leading the way. The other networks allow unchallenged remarks about union activities – Fox only differs in that it is the hosts, and not the guests, that participate in the disinformation as they show pictures of palm trees in Wisconsin. I don’t suppose this is anything new – the United States is a fake republic/democracy ruled by an oligarchy, and unions have been one of the most effective counterbalances to that rule in our history. The history books have been sanitized of the strikes, violence and deaths, like that of Frank Little, strung from a railroad trestle in Butte Montana in 1917. (Little was also opposed to U.S. entry into World War I – all things remain constant). The Pinkerton’s were an early version of Blackwater, a private paramilitary force used to break up strikes.

Freedom is never given anyone – it is always won. Union strength was behind FDR – he could never have accomplished the things he did without movement politics. Unions constitute one of the most powerful grassroots organization forces in our history. Union organizing is a basic human right – even the Catholic Church, itself a top-down hierarchy, supports the right of humans to form labor unions. Unions are strong all over the democratic world, and with them goes a strong middle class, relative equality of income, basic human dignity, and education.

That’s why we hate them so here in the land of the free.

Pundits all over our talking screens who say they love our freedom so much that they hate unions are quick to point out that unions dues are mandatory, and are used to finance political activity.

This is true, to a minor degree. First, unions are not hierarchies, but rather democratic organizations. I don’t mean “democratic” in the cosmetic sense that the members are occasionally allowed to choose between two preselected candidates for high office. Union leaders come from the membership. So there is some sense of fulfillment of common purpose when a union engages in political activity.

Unions usually support Democrats. We only have two choices, and Democrats are slightly less repugnant, so that makes some sense.

Unions engage in issue-oriented activities. This is the type of activity permitted all tax-exempt organizations, including churches, charities, and fraternal organizations. Planned Parenthood engages in education activities regarding birth control, and Focus on the Family supports anti-abortion/birth control campaigns. Unions advocate workplace freedoms, worker benefits, and organizational activities. They support specific legislation, like the Employee Free Choice Act, which was dead-on-arrival in Washington in January of 2009. So much for supporting Democrats.

All of this is legal and healthy activity, part of our civil discourse.

Unions do not give money to individual candidates. This activity is done via PAC’s, or Political Action Committees. Contributions to PAC’s by union members are voluntary. Because of the voluntary nature of PAC contributions, they are free to use the money in any way seen feasible, including direct contributions to candidates. People who don’t like what a PAC is doing are free to give money to other candidates. PAC’s, by the way, must disclose all contributions in a timely manner. Contrast this with Citizens United-empowered corporations who are now allowed to engage in political activity in secret. Most of the Koch Brother support fro Governor Scott Walker was secret, and not the paltry $45,000 that was disclosed.

No doubt there is pressure among union member’s to behave in proscribed manners, including PAC contributions. That goes with the territory, just as a corporate executive cannot expect to advance far unless he engages in bundling with others for the right candidate. And crowd behavior is hard to manage, so that there is often violence during strikes, especially when scabs cross the picket line. And, of course, as Governor Walker talked about doing, there is the agent provocateur, an activity so common that it even has a name. This is the enemy-in-our-camp, the guy planted in a crowd to foment violence. I don’t wish to paint too-rosy a picture here. People are as people do, and unions use coercion in many forms to keep their members in line. I am not a Pollyanna.

Democracy – real democracy, and not mere sheep-like voting – is unruly, angry, even violent at times. Power – real power, and not mere fake ballot-box choices – is best attained by organizational activities. Since unions represent real power, even if mostly unrealized here in the land of the free, unions are scorned, and people are grilled and educated in the power of the individual. They are taught that joining a union is a sign of personal weakness. Real men don’t join unions, union workers are lazy, job benefits are welfare, and of course, the most recent, that public employees don’t perform real work, and are really on welfare.

The United States lags far behind other industrial democracies in many ways, with our oligarchy pulling virtually all the strings, hidden in plain sight. Anti-union indoctrination has been standard fare since the 1930’s. It should come as no surprise in the 21st century that unions are still scorned, and that the most basic of facts about unions are hard to find among the obfuscatory clutter that we call news, or in our Texas-spawned history textbooks.

OK – I’ll own up to this … we were in Barnes and Noble, and there for $7.98 was a book of self-scoring tests called “What’s Your IQ.” I took all of those tests in school, and got the results at that time only in percentile numbers. I’ve never been told my “IQ.” I’ll leave it to my readers to guess the number – the guesses might be from 56 (Swede) to 73 (Fred), to 211 (me).

I haven’t taken anything more than the social skills tests – basically, it says I have none. I’m “argumentative”, it tells me. I gotta give them that.

Here’s a couple of questions they ask:

You have been working at your company for ten years and have not had a history of leaving work early. You have a doctor’s appointment that requires you to leave work a half-hour earlier than scheduled. Instead of letting your boss know you have to leave early, you decide to leave unnoticed and hope nobody sees you. Your boss finds out that you left early and the next day he comes into your office and asks what happened.

Below are five potential responses to your boss. Rate each one according to how effective you think it would be.

1: I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.
2. Look, I never leave early. Will you stop bothering me.
3. I had an appointment that couldn’t be missed. I’m sorry for not telling you.
4. It couldn’t be helped.
5. I understand you’re upset, but I had a personal issue to attend to.

You are taking clients out to a business lunch to discuss a proposal. The clients have a very small budget and you don’t feel that they are worth spending much time on. Your food hasn’t arrived in quite some time and you cannot find your server. A different server walks by your table and you ask them where your food is. The server says “I’m not your server. It’s not my problem.”

You say:
1. I want to talk to your boss right now.
2. I know, but we’re in a hurry. Please find him and send him over.
3. You must be having a rough day today.
4. I know you’re busy too. If you happen to see him, could you ask him to come over?
5. That’s not how you speak to customers.

I don’t know why I don’t do well on these tests, but at least part of it is because they don’t even bother to list the answers I would give. In the first case, I would tell the annoying little creep to go f*** himself. “Jesus Christ! Ten years sucking your d*** and you still think that I have to punch your little ego clock every time I move from point A to point B.”

In the second case, I’d just order a second beer and relax. It’s low pressure, and heck – these might even be nice people to lunch with. We could talk some football or baseball on the company tab. Slow down a little. My experience is that wait staff are generally overworked and underpaid. If they go Galt on us, as with garbage collectors, western civilization collapses.

The correct answers, according to the book are “5” and “5.” I suppose that’s right, but at this point I began to understand that these are tests that are really used in real life, and potential employers use them to judge how submissive people are. As a long-time self-employed person, I recovered my personal dignity and am therefore considered poisoned fruit. I’m unemployable.

Man, what a day yesterday – for me personally. The phone was ringing off the hook, my desk overflows, and at the same time I tried to deal with that creature of the Internet – that Norwegian guy who spices up blogs with links but otherwise offers no substance.

By pure happenstance, as my muddled head tried to deal with both him and work at once, I inadvertently coined a new word. I take full credit as I have “researched it”, also “read about it.” Yeah, OK, I Googled it. The word is free for anyone to use, please do give credit now and then … it can sit astride the one we’ve been using for centuries to describe the attitude people feign when they want to give the impression they know far more about a topic that they do. These are the ones who are certain of their facts even as they don’t have a full grasp of the wide range of “facts” that can be marshaled to support any subject. After all, any assertion can be supported by disparate facts out of context.

Of course, the word I’m referring to, so useful because of it’s deep and rich meaning, is “bullshit.” The word I’ve coined to sit beside the original, but beneath it of course as the original cannot be topped, is “Foxshit.”

So expect me to use it with regularity now .. as in “Swede, that’s just plain Foxshit!”

One thing that is clear out of all of the fun we had yesterday with the punking of Governor Scott Walker is that Scott Walker does not know and has never spoken before to David Koch. We lefties like to throw around the Koch brothers as the force behind everything that is happening in rightwingville these days, and it's not that simple. The Koch's are radical revolutionaries in a sense I'll get to below, but by no means are they isolated or unique. They are just rich and powerful enough to make things happen. The thrust of right-wing talk radio, the think tanks, the Tea Parties (stooges below, but money above), the Republican and Democratic parties, is a large and interconnected network of money. It encompasses vast swaths of our landscape and tens of thousands of people. It is immensely powerful.

I know that sounds like a conspiracy, but that’s just the point – it is not that at all. It’s too big to be managed unless there are common ideals and purposes. The Koch brothers may have been a large factor in Scott Walker’s campaign, and more importantly were behind many of the anonymous Astroturf ads that overwhelmed Wisconsin in the last election. Scott Walker may be the first governor who owes his election in total to Citizens United. But our minds are small, and so we need to put a face on the enemy, as it is hard to hate an amorphous blob of like-minded people.

The Koch brothers serve as that face. We need to get over them.

It’s a large and incredibly wealthy country we live in, and there has always been a power structure hidden in plain sight. It is corporate wealth with the interlocking directorships, wealthy families, the big charities and private universities and the non-profits. (Outfits like Manhattan Institute and Heritage and Cato are the intellectual hirelings of these same people – they are the foot soldiers, sophists and sycophants. Intellectuals throughout history have glommed on to power. They are, after all, smart.) They support most of our office holders via our intentionally loose campaign finance system. They don’t have total power, they do not meet (other than Bohemian Grove). It’s more like an ant hill – people unknowingly cooperating in a very large enterprise. There are tens of thousands of individuals going on about their business, but they have common purpose.

That common purpose gives focus and thrust to that blob of wealth, and the only way to counterbalance that power is to organize. And so it naturally follows that the blob despises any form of organization among ordinary people, be it ACORN or environmental groups. But mostly they hate trade unions. Historically, trade unions have been our most effective organizing tool. They have been a force for political expression. They have offered education to counterbalance standard indoctrination. They have given ordinary people a means of achieving a moderate slice of the pie.

The thrust of this army of ants since World War II has been to eliminate taxes on wealth, the social welfare programs that came out of the Great Depression and New Deal, and to eliminate trade unions. My god do they hate unions!

Most of our aristocracy is simply preoccupied. It takes time an effort to run a corporation or the local opera house or the United Way. And anyway, having a lot of money creates the need for expensive leisure pursuits. There are only a minority of firebrands – people so ideologically hidebound that they have no concept of greater good and at the same time are willing to work tirelessly for their cause. The Koch Brothers are exemplary of this, but not alone by any means. They’ve merely been exposed.

The Koch Brothers and their fellow travelers usually cannot hold public office, as like Steve Forbes, they are not terribly charming or smart or convincing. So they must work through others, sometimes charlatans, but usually true believers. There are on the right an army of people who have imbibed deeply of the Kool Aid of Ayn Rand, and suffer from immense certainty coupled with dense stupidity. It’s a dangerous brew.

I believed Scott Walker yesterday when he said to fake-Dave that he was trying to do the right thing. He really believes that busting unions will make our lives better. He’s not a thinking man, he’s not a visionary. He’s a revolutionary.

Here is the foundation of conservatism as I have understood it all of these years – it is straight out of Burke:

“Society is complex, and human nature unpredictable; therefore, it is not prudent to mess around with political and social arrangements that have stood the test of time.”

OK, I’m not quoting him – he would not have said “mess around.” I’m quoting someone who is summarizing. But that is his thrust. So what would Burke say to these radicals who want to do away with trade unionism, Social Security and Medicare, unemployment compensation, minimum wage and child labor laws … people who have no concept of the immense and unpredictable fallout from such changes? He would say that they are dangerous.

These are not conservatives that we are dealing with. These are dangerous radicals. They are not “evil.” They don’t take orders from the Koch Brothers (though I would like to know who penned the legislation that they are trying to pass in Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio). Scott Walker, if anything, showed me yesterday that he is a man of honorable intentions who wants to bring about positive change. He also showed me that he is a radical who does not listen to opponents, and is so sure that he is right that in his mind he can justify any action he takes to advance his cause.

He is not knowingly bought. He is not intentionally dishonest. He is that combination of certainty and stupidity we see all day long on that news channel. Scott Walker is full of foxshit.

This sounds too good to be true. A Buffalo, NY independent prank-called Governor Scott Walker, pretending to be David Koch.
___________________

Gov. Walker’s spokesman, Cullen Werwie, admits the call was real, according to the same source I linked.

There’s quite a bit of debate about the Wisconsin and Indiana legislative flights to prevent votes on eerily similar right-wing bills. The debate centers around democratic processes.

One argument is that when this is done once, it can be done again – that is, what the Wisconsin Democrats are doing, the Wisconsin Republicans will do next time around. The other assumes that voters know what they are voting on – that there are no surprises in all of this, and that Wisconsin Democrats who have left the state should accept the will of the people.

These assume we are in a functioning democracy. Not hardly. I mentioned two defects in our system at 4&20 yesterday, and Polish Wolf added a third.

1: I said that because of winner-take-all voting, third parties are frozen out. Since reform is usually initiated outside the two parties, winner-take-all voting prevents reform. That’s why historically most of our “reforms”, good (civil rights, for instance) and bad (prohibition?) came from outside the two parties.

2. Our system of private campaign finance is an invitation to corruption. There’s no debate about that – we revel in our corruption. Citizens United is perhaps the most ludicrous and boldfaced insult to thinking people since Dredd Scott. Because of private finance, now even worse due to C/U, the political system is naturally ceded to moneyed interests. There’s a simple reason for this: They have more money. Campaigns, far from being referendums, are diversions. Real issues are rarely discussed.

3. Unrelated to Wisconsin/Indiana, Polish Wolf noted that the U.S. Senate is not a representative body. It was never intended to be – Senators were appointed under the constitution, and two were given each state no matter population. This, coupled with filibuster rule of questionable constitutionality, theoretically allows for 11.3% of the population to thwart majority rule. The Constitution is a flawed document in many ways. This is but one.

Since this is not functioning representative government, methods available for fighting wealth are limited, and usually must be exerted outside on the steps of court houses and lobbies of state capitol buildings. Those who have reveled in the filibuster rule of the last four years are now upset that the legislators in those two states fled, but what is that if not a form of filibuster? The game is rigged anyway, so play dirty.

Scott Walker is a mere front for big money, a Park Avenue-quality whore. The Koch brothers spent over $100,000 on his behalf, secretly at the time but now public knowledge. He and the Republican majority have thrown out the rules of civil debate with their anti-union bill, demanding an up or down vote without debate – without even enough time for Democrats to read the bill.

There’s a reason for that. There’s some bad stuff in that bill even aside from the union-busting. It cannot stand much disinfecting light, and needs to be passed quickly. Walker is trying to bludgeon it through because he knows that if there is debate, he loses.

There is a provision (16.896) to allow Walker to sell of public assets to his cronies. He wants to sell public power plants to private interests without competitive bidding or consultation. Once that is done, how do we get those assets back? Once the gouging starts, like California in the Enron days, how do we get our money back? Do we wait two years for another Koch-money election?

I believe in representative government. I wish we some of it. But this is a fake republic/democracy/whatever, and so the cries that we now hear from the moneyed interests about the need for legal procedures are an insult. How dare they pretend that they too believe in representative government!

Democrats in Wisconsin and Indiana have grown a set, developed some spine. Democrats always let us down, but the thing that sustains them right now are the throngs of people occupying the buildings in those state capitals. They need us now, or they will fold.

That is democracy at work. As in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Bahrain, it ain’t pretty. Whatever it is that we have here (plutocracy), it pretends to be democracy only when democracy serves money.

Muammar Gaddafi appears to be next in line in the cavalcade of sleaze balls facing public protests, and that’s a good thing. We can always use one less tyrant.

But my thoughts took me back to 1986 – I was still a good American at that time, and hated all the right people, Gaddafi among them. (He was “Quadaffi” back then.) There was a bombing in a disco in Germany where some Americans were killed, and the U.S. claimed that Libya was behind it. Reagan launched a huge bombing raid on that country. It felt good … sort of, you know, living vicariously through F-16’s raining bombs on unseen victims.

But it felt creepy too. Maybe I just didn’t blend. I was getting my news from all of the right places, and yet somehow found out that in that raid, along with the hundreds of other civilians, Gaddafi’s young daughter was killed. Memories fade, but as I recall, he witnessed her death. [They are saying on the news now that people around him say that he never recovered from watching that murder.)

They never did solve the disco bombing, never pinned it on Libya, by the way. Not that it matters. The Empire writes its own history.

My own children were very young at that time, and the thought of seeing one of them murdered was extremely unsettling. Maybe I just never was a good right winger. Within a few years I would be free of all of the ugliness, and no longer had to smooth things over in my mind. I could call murder … murder.

Then there was the whole Lockerbie thing. I have never been satisfied with the official explanation of that event. The man who was imprisoned for the crime, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, never confessed, and is widely thought to be a patsy. When Libya formally admitted to the deed, there was quid pro quo – the U.S. took Libya off the list of nations that “sponsor terrorism.” (As if we have a right to such a list! How many lists is the Empire on?)

More logical to me, and I think there were hints of this at the time, Lockerbie was done by the Iranians in retaliation for the U.S.S. Vincennes shooting down an Iranian passenger jetliner. But that explanation was unacceptable in ‘official truth’ terms, as that would have made it “blowback,” like 9/11, and the empire never confesses to crimes and there is never a reason for blowback. Ever.

It’s a horrible deed no matter who did it, of course. Just as shooting down that Iranian airliner was. But somehow we escape ever having to look in the mirror. We are always able to project our evil on others.

Anyway, as with Tunesia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Iran, Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana, I hope for a peaceful outcome and to see some tyrants actually pay a price. Not death, not bombs, but a good long prison term, and time to reflect. Reagan belonged there, as have all his successors.

But it is too much to ask justice in life, and I know that. Just sayin’.