E. J. Dionne Jr. urges that "all sides stop fighting and pool their energies to easing the marriage and family crisis that is engulfing working-class Americans"

Says E.J.: "Kenworthy’s argument is that we can 'successfully embrace both flexibility and security, both competition and social justice.' His wish list is a straightforward set of progressive initiatives."


"We now seem to be living in the Age of High C, a period when every fight is Armageddon, every foe is a monster, and every issue is either the key to national survival or the doorway to ruin. . . .

"When I look around, I see a lot of liberals who live quite traditional family lives and even go regularly to churches, synagogues and mosques. I see a lot of conservatives who are feminists when it comes to their daughters' opportunities and who oppose bigotry against gays and lesbians."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washington Post
column "To a healthier democracy"

by Ken

My only problem with E. J. Dionne Jr.'s eminently sensible column urging a tone-down of the rhetorical decibel level is the notion that there's anything remotely symmetrical in the allotment of blame, when there's no doubt in my mind that it is caused, screeched, and blood-sucked-on something like 99 percent by the Right, which uses culture wars as a substitute for thought and for actually dealing with problems -- not to mention all that toxic grunge stored up inside them. In extreme cases like washingtonpost.com's hired right hand Jennifer Rubin, it appears to be the only reason for the vile creature's continuing to draw breath.

Now, it's certainly hard to quarrel with E.J.'s opening:

Meg Greenfield, the late Post editorial page editor, counseled against writing in “High C” all the time. By this she meant that an editorialist or columnist who expressed equally noisy levels of indignation about everything would lack credibility when something truly outrageous came along that merited a well-crafted high-pitched scream.

We now seem to be living in the Age of High C, a period when every fight is Armageddon, every foe is a monster, and every issue is either the key to national survival or the doorway to ruin.

And it's even harder to quarrel with his proposition that "this habit seems especially pronounced in the way President Obama's adversaries treat him." He goes on: "It's odd that so many continue to see Obama as a radical and a socialist even as the Dow hits record levels and the wealthy continue to do very nicely. If he is a socialist, he is surely the most incompetent practitioner in the history of Marxism." And here I guess I do have a little problem. I get the point that E.J. is making, but the first objection to the proposition that Obama is either a radical or a socialist is that you have to be a total ignoramus or a pathological liar to advance the proposition. That matters, doesn't it?

Certainly E.J. has an interesting point when he argues that in reality we are philosophically less divided than the ideological warriors "pretend."

In all of the well-off democracies, even people who call themselves socialists no longer claim to have an alternative to the market as the primary creator and distributor of goods and services. The boundaries on the left end of what’s permissible in the public debate have been pushed well toward the center. This makes the hysteria and hyperbole all the more incomprehensible.

Now he has a book plug, and coming from E.J. it certainly deserves to be taken seriously.

But let’s dream a little and assume that the American left signed on to the proposals put forward by Lane Kenworthy of the University of California-San Diego in his challenging (and, by the way, very pro-market) book “Social Democratic America,” published this year. Kenworthy’s argument is that we can “successfully embrace both flexibility and security, both competition and social justice.”

His wish list is a straightforward set of progressive initiatives. A few of them: universal health insurance and early education, extensive new help on job searches and training, a year of paid parental leave, an increased minimum wage indexed to prices, expansions of efforts that supplement wages such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the government as an employer of last resort.

His program, he says, would cost around 10 percent of our gross domestic product. Now that’s a lot of money, and the debate about whether we should spend it would be anything but phony. Yet would such a level of expenditure signal the death of our constitutional system? Would it make us like, say, Cuba? No and no. It might make us a little more like Germany, the Netherlands or the Scandinavian countries. We can argue if we want to do this, but these market democracies happen to share with us an affection for freedom and enterprise.

Returning to his "High C" theme, E.J. says

there’s nothing quite like our culture wars, in which disagreements about social issues are seen as battles between libertines and bigots. When I look around, I see a lot of liberals who live quite traditional family lives and even go regularly to churches, synagogues and mosques. I see a lot of conservatives who are feminists when it comes to their daughters’ opportunities and who oppose bigotry against gays and lesbians.

And he makes a pitch for joint action on behalf of the beleaguered family:

The ideological resolution I’d suggest for the new year is that all sides stop fighting and pool their energies to easing the marriage and family crisis that is engulfing working-class Americans.

This would require liberals to acknowledge what the vast majority of them already practice in their own lives: that, all things being equal, kids are better off with two loving and engaged parents. It would require conservatives to acknowledge that many of the pressures on families are economic and that the decline of well-paying blue-collar work is causing huge disruptions in family formation. I’d make a case that Kenworthy’s ideas for a more social democratic America would be good for families, but let’s argue it out in the spirit of a shared quest for remedies.

Maybe it’s asking too much, but might social conservatives also consider my friend Jonathan Rauch’s idea that they abandon their campaign against gay marriage in favor of a new campaign on behalf of the value of committed relationships for all of us?

Disagreement is one of the joys of freedom, so I am all for boisterous debate and tough political and philosophical competition. It’s how I make my living. But our democratic system would be healthier if it followed the Greenfield rule and reserved the harshest invective for things that are genuinely monstrous.

And again, I have nothing to quarrel with except the notion that this is aleft-right divide, when it's the Right that has created the model of the "family" as a cesspool of sociopathology if not outright psychosis whose principal function is as a breeding ground for future sociopaths. And I don't see how the chasm between this and a belief in basic human decency can be bridged.

Still, who knows?
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On the other hand, just possibly Rupert would have known how to cash in on Glenn Beck's Hitlerizing

What do bust-enhanced model Katie Price (aka Jordan) and martial-arts guy and sort-of actor Alex Reid -- Britain's, er, former sweethearts -- have to do with the culture clash between "serious" and "tabloid" journalism? Read on.

"Murdoch was warming [the six-year-old Profumo sex scandal] up again, because his instinct, as keen as ever, told him that the will to forgive is weaker, in the communal conscience, than the urge to drool. He was reported as saying, 'People can sneer all they like, but I'll take the hundred and fifty thousand extra copies we're going to sell.'"

"[I]f one had to isolate an instant, in the thirty years of his ownership [of London's Times and Sunday Times], that best portrayed the Murdoch touch it would be the dictum that he issued, over the phone, on the evening of Saturday, April 23, 1983. The Sunday Times, poised to publish Hitler's diaries, had hit a wrinkle; the historian Lord Dacre, who had verified their authenticity, was having second thoughts. Stop the presses, or forge ahead? Over to Murdoch, in New York: 'Fuck Dacre. Publish.'"

-- Anthony Lane, in "Hack Journalism" in the Aug. 1 New Yorker

by Ken

You know how sometimes even as you say or write something you're thinking, "On the other hand . . . ?" That happened to me last night while I was writing my post "Glenn Beck gives Rupert Murdoch something to smile about." A nagging voice in my head cautioned, "Are you sure of that?," in connection with the opening:

When shocked word began to spread about Glenn Beck's latest sociopathic blitherings, I'm guessing that Rupert Murdoch cracked his first smile in weeks. I imagine him saying to one of his underlings something like: "Thank God the little shit isn't our problem anymore."

On the whole I still think it's fairly likely that ol' Rupe is relieved at having cut Glenno loose in time to be spared the embarrassment of the little shit's likening of the Norwegian Labor Party's youth camp at Utoya to the Hitler Youth. But then I flashed to a piece I've been meaning to write about ever since I read it right after I posting my Tuesday piece about Fox Noise not being subject to challenges to its news ethics given that it's not in the news business.

The piece is Anthony Lane's "Hack Work: A tabloid culture runs amok," and it offers an interestingly different perspective on the master of News Corp, no doubt influenced by closer familiarity with the operation of Rupert's British newspapers. Lane approaches the phone-hacking scandal by looking back at some of the more, um, colorful landmarks of the Murdoch era in British journalism, then writes:

All of which suggests that the seeds of the current crisis were planted long ago. If your attitude toward the lives of others is that of a house burglar confronted by an open window; if you consider it part of your business to fabricate conversations where none exist; and if your boss treats his employees with a derision that they, following suit, extend to the subjects of their inquiries -- if those elements are already in place, then the decision to, say, hack into someone's cell phone is almost no decision at all. It is merely the next step. All that is required is the technology. What ensues may be against the law, but it goes no more against the grain of common decency than any other tool of your trade.

A point Lane makes is one that many Rupert-watchers seem to me to miss: that what he's basically about is making money. He recalls Rupert being taken to task by the Archbishop of Westminster in 1969,

for having bought and splashed, or resplashed, the memoirs of Christine Keeler in the News of the World. She was the woman who had enjoyed simultaneous affairs with the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, and a Soviet attaché--a grave security risk and, by any standards, a superheated news story. But that had all happened six years earlier; Profumo had resigned and devoted himself to work among the poor, in the East End, and the saga had grown cold. Murdoch was warming it up again, because his instinct, as keen as ever, told him that the will to forgive is weaker, in the communal conscience, than the urge to drool. He was reported as saying, "People can sneer all they like, but I'll take the hundred and fifty thousand extra copies we're going to sell."

"As one scans the history of Murdoch's rise," Lane writes, "[a] mission to entertain assumes far more importance than his political agenda.

Unlike [onetime Daily Mail and Daily Mirror owner Lord] Rothermere and [onetime Daily Express owner Lord] Beaverbrook, he relishes not the orotundity of power ("It is the duty of newspapers to advocate a policy of optimism in the broadest sense," Beaverbrook said, in 1922) but the more subtle power of suggestion. (When Murdoch was angling to buy the Times, he entered a committee room "like someone visiting a friend in hospital" -- the recollection of Harry Evans, who was about to cross over as editor of the Sunday paper to editor of the daily paper.) Murdoch is not prone to intellectual nicety, and his support for any given government has been determined, more often than not, by its willingness to strike the fetters from the market; once the Conservatives chose not to refer his takeover of the Times and the Sunday Times to the Monopolies Commission, it was easy to guess where Murdoch's fealty would lie. But if one had to isolate an instant, in the thirty years of his ownership, that best portrayed the Murdoch touch it would be the dictum that he issued, over the phone, on the evening of Saturday, April 23, 1983. The Sunday Times, poised to publish Hitler's diaries, had hit a wrinkle; the historian Lord Dacre, who had verified their authenticity, was having second thoughts. Stop the presses, or forge ahead? Over to Murdoch, in New York: "Fuck Dacre. Publish."

I don't know how easy it would have been to sell more newspapers, or draw more televiewers, based on Glenno's drooling, but if anyone could have found a way, you can be sure it would have been our Rupert.
In the "how and why" department, I should let Lane continue from the point where I just interrupted him, recalling Rupert's dressing down by the Archbishop of Westminster.

Nonetheless, he apologized to the Cardinal, thus setting a pattern that persists to this day. Murdoch would preside over an exclusive, reap the reward, and, if necessary, express contrition, while his underlings readied themselves for the next scoop. On July 16th of this year, as the hacking scandal bloomed, News Corporation placed full-page advertisements in several newspapers--including, with some panache, the Guardian -- headlined "WE ARE SORRY," and adding, "Our business was founded on the idea that a free and open press should be a positive force in society. We need to live up to this." That is a direct descendant of a statement that Murdoch issued in 1995: "This company will not tolerate its papers bringing into disrepute the best practices of popular journalism."

We can laugh if we will, about this ringing commitment to "the best practices of popular journalism." We can also wonder what exactly it means. Clearly the inclusion of that word "popular" is important, producing a phrase that means something different from "the best practices of journalism."

"Popular journalism" would presumably stand in noticeable contrast to the stuff they teach in the journalism schools. Or the kind of prissy, carefully sourced, fact-based reporting espoused by fancy-pants elite news operations, what we might call, oh, fair and balanced reporting, where nothing matters more than rooting out and reporting the story so the readers/viewers can decide.

Oh wait.

Whatever that 1995 statement meant when it said, "This company will not tolerate its papers bringing into disrepute the best practices of popular journalism," it presumably encompasses the kind of flagrant news manipulation that longtime New York Times reporter-editor-columnist Joyce Purnick was talking about recently (see my "Postscript on the problem with 'news' coverage Murdoch-style: Joyce Purnick recalls the New York Post takeover") based on her experience as the Post chief political reporter at the time, when Murdoch jumped right into using his new property to install Ed Koch as mayor of New York City.

It didn't matter what we [i.e., she and the paper's other surviving legit reporters] wrote, because we were surrounded by propaganda for Ed Koch. You know, there were all those photos, and all those poll stories and all those headlines. It didn't matter that somewhere in the back of the paper or the middle of the paper I had a short story that was perfectly legitimate. It didn't matter, that's the point. The paper had become a propaganda tool.

I took away three more themes sounded by Lane which don't seem to me part of the standard thinking about Rupert M:

* Whatever one may think of the kind of newspapers he puts out, he really does love newspapers, an attitude that is otherwise pretty much extinct among contemporary moguls. Oh, he understands that the big money is now to be made in other media. Nevertheless, his passion for print seems undimmed. (To which I would add that, characteristically, he has found ways of making them "pay," if not directly at the cash register -- as tools of influence, of course, and also in synergistic combination with those newer, flashier media, as for example he expects to be able to do with Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal.)

* While that passion for newspapers may be undimmed, Master Rupert's standing has changed. In, granted, the kind of "journalism" he believes in -- call it "tabloid," or "popular"? -- he once seemed to derive his greatest pleasures from sticking it to the powers-that-be, but over time he has become a power-that-is. Lane notes that the switch from "insider" to "outsider" position and mentality is far from uncommon, and I think most of us who've had much contact with "outsiders' to the establishment discover that for many (most?) of them, consciously or otherwise, the deepest desire is to make precisely this switch, to get their "share."

* In the matter of journalistic propriety, of suitable subject matter and treatment, Murdoch knows something that many media observers don't: that the "tabloid culture" has already prevailed. In British newspapering, notably, the trash that was once the province of the sensationalist Sunday tabloids increasingly became the bread-and-butter of the dailies.

[A]s Kevin Williams explains in his book Read All About It, the decline of the mass Sunday newspaper is attributed to the incorporation of its values into the mainstream daily papers. The reader did not have to wait for the sleaze, scandals, and sex that up until the 1960s had only been available on Sundays.” Lurking somewhere behind this is a sulfurous inversion of religious practice: it’s not enough to confess your faith on the Lord’s day; you must go out and live it every day of the week.

However, the loss of those old Sunday-tabloid readers has been to an extent offset by a growing readership for them among the up-market patrons of the tonier dailies.

Over the course of four decades, under Murdoch's approving gaze, the lowbrow has paid no more attention to the highbrow than it ever did, while the highbrow has paid both heed and obeisance to the low -- submission, in the weird wrangling of British class consciousness, being preferable to condescension. The most telling piece in the Guardian, in the wake of the hacking scandal, came from a former editor of the paper, Peter Preston, who analyzed the sales figures and showed that more ABC1 readers (that is, those with better education, employment, and pay, and thus close to advertisers' hearts) read the News of the World than the Sunday Times -- more, indeed, than the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph, and the Independent on Sunday put together. Murdoch must have closed the Screws with a pang.

And having worked his way back to the now-defunct News of the World, Lane signs off with this heartwarming bit of anecdotal data regarding "tabloid culture":

The front page of the March 27th edition bore an archetypal story, in that it was barely a story at all. The headline read "JORDAN DROVE ME TO SUICIDE." Now, this could not literally be true, unless the paper's foreign desk was even more foreign than we knew. Rather, the lucky survivor was Alex Reid, a professional cage-fighter, and formerly the paramour of Jordan -- the defining, improbable deity of the past ten years, acclaimed for her volcanic breast implants, for her crowning appearance on a jungle-based reality show, "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!," and for the five best-selling novels that she engendered but did not actually write. In short, like other personae in the Murdochian drama, she scarcely exists outside the appetites of the tabloid press -- and there, you might expect, she would remain, as safe a standby as Christine Keeler was. Should you wish, however, to delve into all that Jordan means, and the reasons for her reign in the jungle that is Great Britain, there were two lengthy, in-depth interviews published last year, one with her and the other with Alex Reid. Both were in the Guardian.

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Can we break the Right's chokehold on the targets of teabaggery?

by Ken

An issue that comes up regularly in the Culture Wars, and therefore is once again being heard in the era of the Teabag Resurgence, is the agonized resentment of honest working folk against "liberal elites." Inescapably we are told that when we describe as "stupid" the dumber-than-cretinous imbecilities these gullible souls swallow from their propaganda overlords and regurgitate, we simply reinforce their image of us as "liberal elitists," and therefore it's no wonder that these sainted folk have become politically beyond our reach.

I don't deny at all that there is an enormous problem here, that these people indeed regard us as liberal elites. (It's no help that "Ivy League" often gets tossed into the conversational garbage dump.) But I get kind of, um, twisted with rage that it's all our fault, that we who've been attempting to salvage some shards of truth amidst the socioeconomic wreckage are the villains of this drama, while all those who are actively engaged in the enslavement of that segment of our population in ignorance, not to mention those who have embraced the lies and manipulations, are judged saintly innocents. (I also resent like heck the assumption that only these saintly "working" folk work for a living, that only they struggle to make ends meet. But that's a side issue.)

The result is that the right-wing demagogues who treat these sainted innocents with such vicious contempt, all in the interest of their own aggrandizement, and especially the real elites, the Big Money right-wingers who take such cruel advantage of people they regard as barely human -- including the real elites of the Ivy League -- get off scot-free.

And the problem of the unreachability of all those people who embrace being lied to and enslaved goes on. It's considered unseemly to point out that the people who talk most, and most sensibly, about their plight are the very "liberal elitists" who are the villains here, assumed by our apparent intellectual and ideological betters to be unaware that these folks have "legitimate grievances."

The arrogance of this seems to me rivaled only by its delusion, whether it comes from demagogues on the Right or our friends on the Left.

All of which is why I'm presenting at full length this Truthout piece by Mike Elk, which seems to me a more nuanced than usual version of this case, which might begin to make it possible for us to at least think together about this problem, which is looking to become a centrally unhelpful reality of the near-term political future, together.

This brief bio of the author appears on Truthout.com: "Mike Elk works for the Campaign for America's Future. Previously, he worked as a union organizer for the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, and as a staffer on the Obama-Biden campaign."

My Grandmother Takes a Stand for Gay Marriage in Church Despite Being a Glenn Beck Follower

Thursday 10 December 2009
by: Mike Elk, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

I was shocked when I heard that my conservative Grandma had stormed out of church after her pastor denounced "being gay as the worst sin." My 81-year-old grandmother, who has two gay grandchildren, wasn't taking any of that shit, and made my mother, my aunt, uncle and cousins leave the church after having attended it for nearly ten years.

Doing such a thing in a small town in western Pennsylvania, which fits Barack Obama's definition of a "bitter town" almost perfectly, is unheard of. It was an absolute scandal throughout the small town where she lives.

However, what was even more shocking was that when, at Thanksgiving dinner, I asked my grandmother which book she was reading, she responded, "Glenn Beck's 'Common Sense.'" Fortunately, my mouth was full of mashed potatoes so I had a few moments to gather myself before responding politely, "Oh, yes, that Glenn Beck, he's a passionate fellow." My aunt, responding genuinely, replied, "Oh, yes, Glenn Beck he really makes you think about things in ways that nobody else ever does. I watch Glenn Beck's show everyday."

My uncle Billy, a Vietnam veteran who's been laid off seven times, looking to start a fight, piped up, "Michael, do you like Glenn Beck?" The whole table turned to me, and for the first time in my life I was glad I suffered from a stutter. Fortunately, my grandmother mercifully invoked the "politics and religion at the dinner table" rule before my stammer came to a standstill.

There are at least eight million daily followers of Glenn Beck in America, and a good chunk of them are people like my grandmother and my uncle Billy - well-intentioned people that care about their country, their families and their communities, otherwise they wouldn't watch a show about politics. However, to label all these Glenn Beck followers as unreachable, bigoted racists is an extraordinary dangerous and misleading move for the progressive movement, which aims to include all people.

My grandmother's own vocal protest for gay rights in her church disproved that Glenn Beck followers tend to vote Republican merely because of gods, gays and guns. Sure, this wins over a large portion of them, but it doesn't explain how the Republican Party is able to win over people like my grandmother, who were once hardcore Democrats and never fell prey to such hate-baiting tactics in the past.

My grandmother is a registered Democrat, the widow of a union leader and local Democratic leader, whom my mother claimed must have rolled over in his grave when he heard my grandmother voted for a Republican. My uncle Billy comes from the same place; growing up, he told me that we needed to abolish both parties and form a worker's party, due to his deep distrust of both major parties.

The right has been winning over working-class whites by fostering hate since Richard Nixon. They are good at targeting groups. However, there has always been an equal number of white working-class people who never fail prey to such fear-mongering tactics. They voted for plenty of the most elite sounding northeastern liberals like Michael Dukakis because they knew Republicans were on the side of big corporations - the true elitists. However, this has all changed dramatically in the last 20 years because Republicans are actively targeting those working-class people using a different appeal.

The county where my grandmother is from -Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania - in 1988 voted for card-carrying ACLU member Michael Dukakis by an 11 point margin of victory, yet voted for McCain in 2008 by a 17 point margin. What happened in between, you might ask?

Tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs disappeared, and Westmoreland County was turned into a degraded version of its former self. Democrats on the national level did nothing in response to challenge the corporate ideology that wiped out their community and their way of life.

Glenn Beck followers tend to primarily be these inhabitants of the "bitter towns" who lost faith in government. As my colleague Sara Robinson points out, why would working-class people trust a government that is "so clearly rigged to suck money straight out of their pockets into the tax-free offshore bank accounts of the wealthy - who, of course, turn right around and use that money to buy off our government"?

The fight then becomes over who controls government, and cable TV news presents them with faces that fight the Ivy League liberal-elite stereotypes. Glenn Beck and his followers attack liberals as being out-of-touch Ivy League elitists, neglecting to mention that most prominent conservatives are also Ivy Leaguers.

We respond by calling the other side "stupid" in cable news sound byte clips, and they respond back at us by calling us "elitists"; this quickly devolves into an endless series of glorified name calling.

As Matt Taibbi notes in his must-read piece "Sarah Palin - WWE Star," about the soap operatization of politics via cable news:

What we call "politics" has devolved into a kind of ongoing, brainless soap opera about dueling cultural resentments, and the really cool thing about it, if you're a TV news producer or a talk radio host, is that you can build the next day's news cycle meme around pretty much anything at all, no matter how irrelevant ...

And while some of us are old enough to remember that once upon a time these arguments always had at least some sort of ideological flavor to them, i.e. the throwdowns were at least rooted in some sort of real political issue (war, taxes, immigration, etc.) we've now got a whole generation that is accustomed to screaming at cultural enemies as an end in itself, for the sheer dismal fun of it.

This is the dilemma that relying on impersonal communications leaves us in. Cable news and other forms of electronic communication tend to win ratings using name calling and conflict. The blogosphere has done incredible things in educating the base, educating a young net savvy generation, funding political causes and holding cable news personalities like Lou Dobbs accountable. However, it hasn't changed the fundamental dynamic of cultural resentment between social and economic classes that cable news breeds. In some way, the Internet fuels it even more - just Google Sarah Palin and you'll see what I'm talking about. Cable news breeds a cultural resentment that creates a sense of distrust between college-educated liberals and potential allies in the working-class communities. In order to restore trust in government, we must restore trust in the people that are supposed to run government - ourselves.

In his famous book "Bowling Alone," Robert Putnam shows that trust among people disappears when members of different socio-economic classes don't interact and get to know each other through social organizations. He aptly names his book "Bowling Alone," based on the statistics that more Americans are bowling than at any time, but in fewer and fewer bowling leagues. What we need to do to rebuild trust among classes is to bring people into organizations where they can realize through interaction their shared interests.

Currently, there is only one place in America where illegal immigrants and Glenn Beck followers sit down together on a regular basis and fight for their collective self interests - the halls of organized labor. Unions unite people behind shared self-interest and a common social purpose: making their jobs better - something we all desire. Through working together, they gain trust of one another and are less likely to be victims of conservative scare tactics.

The statistics don't lie. Obama won by 23 points among white, noncollege graduates who belong to a union, even as he lost by 18 points among all white, noncollege voters.

Working-class whites aren't just more likely to vote for progressives when organized labor is strong, so are people of color, women and young people. As the landslide loss of corporate, anti-workers' rights Democrat Creigh Deeds in Virginia shows, working whites will vote for Republicans for cultural reasons when a Democrat fails to stand up for them. However, people of color, women and young people don't have a cultural punching bag in "liberal elites," so when Democrats disappoint, they simply don't vote.


Thus, keeping people from joining unions and thereby upsetting the conservative ruling class that thrives on cultural resentment is the number one goal of conservatives. The biggest barrier for making strong unions is the fact that 30,000 workers are fired from their job every year for trying to join a union. In the United States, an employer has to post a piece of paper saying they fired a worker for trying to a join. As my father, a union organizer, always said, "If the penalty for robbing a bank was you had to post a piece of paper saying you robbed a bank, we'd all be bank robbers!"

Killing the Employee Free Choice Act is the number one priority of the Chamber of Commerce for this reason. It's more urgent for them to squash than climate change and health care reform put together. They know that increased unionization threatens their whole balance of power.

It is time that we realize that the Employee Free Choice Act is this important. The Employee Free Choice Act is not just a union issue. Without a revitalized labor movement, we get bogged down in the cultural wars of TV, and any progressive change we make is unsustainable. We need to create organs of social dialogue.

Is it really necessary to point out how much fuel the Obama brain trust is dumping on this fire?

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