The McCain-Palin Con Game

The McCain-Palin Con Game

By Norman Markowitz

The surreal Republican convention has ended. Sneering, smirking reactionaries took the platform to mock Barack Obama's work in the 1980s as a community organizer in Chicago.

The 1980s, unlike the 1960s, were a time when it was hard to be a community organizer since national and local power structures were treating poor communities the way they treat stray cats and dogs: with neglect, until they make trouble and then locked up and removed from public view.

If Barack Obama had become a stockbroker or a banker at a savings and loan, or a shopping mall real estate developer, or had gone to work for John McCain's father-in-law in the beer distribution business, he would have been at home at this Republican convention. (But only if one ignores the fact that he is African American, and even the tiny number of African American delegates to this convention didn't quite feel at home in a party which has written them off, even as tokens.)

Republicans don't like community organizers, and you could see it on their faces. They don't like environmentalists. They sneer and cheer when their leaders tell them that journalists, teachers, people in the not so highly paid professions are "elitists" and corporate leaders, bankers, billionaires are representatives of "ordinary folks." They are against lobbyists even though the great majority of lobbyists work for the firms and interests that bankroll their party.

The ultra right, as was noted nearly 100 years ago by progressives (some of whom at the time were Republicans), cravenly serves and protects the "vested interest," the large corporations, banks, great financial syndicates represented at that time most of all by Morgan and Rockefeller, and denounce the "special interests," labor unions, reformers fighting for workmen's compensation, housing reform laws, women's suffrage, the abolition of child labor, as seeking special privileges against the interests of the American people.

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