I've been thinking about the "Ownership Society" for a few days and getting madder and madder at the intolerance, arrogance, and sheer brutality of it.
...I suppose I should be used to it by now: balancing the budget on our backs, scheming to take every possible advantage of us, the attitude from owners that they're such paragons of virtue we ought to be willing to work for them for nothing and consider it a privilege, the invisibility, the lack of respect, and the daily fight to get through another week. I should be but I'm not. I admit it: I'm not less angry in my old(er) age, I'm more angry.
...For 25 years I have watched our lives go from bad to worse to awful, experienced the shrinking of our presence in society from near-invisible to practically-invisible to "What? Are you still here? I thought you were dead." I have seen the gains we made with sweat and blood -literally - washed away in a sea of anti-labor rhetoric. Saddest of all, I have seen way too many of us buy into that rhetoric and sign on to a movement that we refuse to understand, despite all the signs and signals, is dedicated to our destruction.
......I was talking union at the shop one day a couple of years ago - which I used to do a lot, to the point where many ran when they saw me coming - and one of the guys said to me that he would never join a union because he'd be "stuck with it" forever....
...There's nothing wrong with dreaming. What was wrong was that he wasn't even rich yet and he already saw protecting workers as something separate from that dream and a barrier to it. He was a worker himself, yet he saw other workers as his natural enemies; a union was a bunch of them banding together to take away from him what he didn't even have yet, scheming what and how much they would steal as soon as he managed to acquire - something.
That's what makes Bush's sales pitch so powerful - and so dangerous. First they convinced us that we all want to be owners; then they convinced us that we all could be owners if we'd just stop wasting our time demanding frivolous luxuries like fair wages, affordable housing, and protection from the powerful. We, too, could be rich if we stood on our own two feet and stopped expecting the government to do "everything" for us. And now the're trying to convince us that society itself is based on "ownership"; that if we don't "own" something, we're not really Americans and we don't really count. So they, philanthropists that they are, are going to arrange it so we can "own" things, like debts and the responsibility to pay all the taxes corporations are ducking.
The invidiousness of this concept is almost beyond words.
...I suppose I should be used to it by now: balancing the budget on our backs, scheming to take every possible advantage of us, the attitude from owners that they're such paragons of virtue we ought to be willing to work for them for nothing and consider it a privilege, the invisibility, the lack of respect, and the daily fight to get through another week. I should be but I'm not. I admit it: I'm not less angry in my old(er) age, I'm more angry.
...For 25 years I have watched our lives go from bad to worse to awful, experienced the shrinking of our presence in society from near-invisible to practically-invisible to "What? Are you still here? I thought you were dead." I have seen the gains we made with sweat and blood -literally - washed away in a sea of anti-labor rhetoric. Saddest of all, I have seen way too many of us buy into that rhetoric and sign on to a movement that we refuse to understand, despite all the signs and signals, is dedicated to our destruction.
......I was talking union at the shop one day a couple of years ago - which I used to do a lot, to the point where many ran when they saw me coming - and one of the guys said to me that he would never join a union because he'd be "stuck with it" forever....
...There's nothing wrong with dreaming. What was wrong was that he wasn't even rich yet and he already saw protecting workers as something separate from that dream and a barrier to it. He was a worker himself, yet he saw other workers as his natural enemies; a union was a bunch of them banding together to take away from him what he didn't even have yet, scheming what and how much they would steal as soon as he managed to acquire - something.
That's what makes Bush's sales pitch so powerful - and so dangerous. First they convinced us that we all want to be owners; then they convinced us that we all could be owners if we'd just stop wasting our time demanding frivolous luxuries like fair wages, affordable housing, and protection from the powerful. We, too, could be rich if we stood on our own two feet and stopped expecting the government to do "everything" for us. And now the're trying to convince us that society itself is based on "ownership"; that if we don't "own" something, we're not really Americans and we don't really count. So they, philanthropists that they are, are going to arrange it so we can "own" things, like debts and the responsibility to pay all the taxes corporations are ducking.
The invidiousness of this concept is almost beyond words.
Amen.
Read the whole post.
I've been saying now for a few years that this country needs a revival of unions - not the unions of today, but the unions of the day when unions clawed their bloody way into being - the days of Eugene Debs. It looks like Mick Arran, From the Trenches, is ready to revive them.
Bush and his corporate cronies are actually Molochite devotees, servants to the belief that Greed is the highest emotion, and the acquisition of "things" is the only measure of achievement. Moloch recognizes no human values, praises no human qualities, shows pity for no one and remorse for nothing. He is a single, simple force - he Takes. He is that in all of us that urges the virtues of unchecked selfishness whenever our generosity would have a price that would be hard to pay....
...Now I've identified the enemy. The enemy isn't Bush or Cheney or Ashcroft or Chao or Norquist or DeLay. The enemy is the shadowy figure behind and above all of them, the cold stone of a dead idol in which we've invested massive power because messy, chaotic, undisciplined Life scares us but doesn't move the stone.
All of which is an astoundingly long-winded way of saying that this site is going to stop assuming the war is metaphorical and start treating it like it's a real shooting war - which it is. Thus Dispatch From the Trenches - messages from and for The Front where the battles are being fought and the troops are doing the dying.
...I think hope (remember "hope"?) is a function of the belief that things can change for the better, but also the result of active resistance to and rejection of anything and anyone who tries to take that hope away by closing off options and rigidly defining what's an "acceptable" response. Anger is a key part of that half of Hope. You need focused anger to resist and resist and resist again.
...Now I've identified the enemy. The enemy isn't Bush or Cheney or Ashcroft or Chao or Norquist or DeLay. The enemy is the shadowy figure behind and above all of them, the cold stone of a dead idol in which we've invested massive power because messy, chaotic, undisciplined Life scares us but doesn't move the stone.
All of which is an astoundingly long-winded way of saying that this site is going to stop assuming the war is metaphorical and start treating it like it's a real shooting war - which it is. Thus Dispatch From the Trenches - messages from and for The Front where the battles are being fought and the troops are doing the dying.
...I think hope (remember "hope"?) is a function of the belief that things can change for the better, but also the result of active resistance to and rejection of anything and anyone who tries to take that hope away by closing off options and rigidly defining what's an "acceptable" response. Anger is a key part of that half of Hope. You need focused anger to resist and resist and resist again.
Welcome to the Resistance.
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