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:smoke: :smoke: by David Benjamin Dear Freeloaders:
Our lives suck.
We want yours to suck, too!
Our political outlook was ably articulated in recent interviews in Janesville, Wisconsin by the New York Times. There, A.G. Sulzberger and Monica Davey found cashiered ex-union members eager to condemn public employees now fighting in Madison to protect their collective bargaining rights. Lucky for us, these crack reporters from New York City don’t know that Janesville is locally regarded as the “Mississippi of Wisconsin,” a town that drew a red line through the middle of Rock County a century ago and spent generations battling tooth-and-nail to keep the black folks in Beloit from moving ten miles north and ruining their lily-white neighborhoods. Sulzberger and Davey would have ruined their story by pointing out that Janesville is a longstanding bastion of right-wing reaction and bourgeois bigotry.
Like the white traditionalists of Janesville, we — the castoffs of General Motors and the casualties of Reaganism — have embraced a zero-sum world. We believe that if something good happens to someone else, that good something was taken from us.
We believe that if we can’t have it, you shouldn’t have it, either. Your good fortune is our misfortune. Your success is our grudge.
The only satisfaction left to us is to destroy you. Your destruction does us no good, but it will make you just as miserable as we are. And that will make us smile.
Lucky for us, there are powerful forces contributing to your doom. We know these forces, because they crushed us first. A rich and mighty few — every one a Republican (like us) — have systematically offshored our jobs, hollowed American industry, played craps with the U.S. economy, busted our unions and waged a relentless, ruthless war against organized labor. Knowing we are powerless against these forces of organized wealth, we have gone over to them — not as equals, of course. We speak for them. We dress up in funny hats and carry misspelled slogans on their behalf. They point to us, their foils, and call themselves, by association, “populist.” In return, some — but not all — of us receive the odd handout, or perhaps a comic, pathetic moment on YouTube.
We know that none of the “real money” hoarded by organized wealth will trickle down to us. That’s not the point. By taking away our rights to bargain, to negotiate, to discuss our working conditions, to fight for our jobs, to retain our dignity and to bestow hope on our children, organized wealth has left the post-union working class without pride or aspirations. We envy, revere, ogle and parrot the rich but harbor no illusions of ever becoming rich ourselves. We have become — as we were three centuries ago — peasants, beholden totally to the commands and caprices of “lords” who have no concept of how we live, who often wonder why we even bother to live.
cont'
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/23-6
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