Yesterday, in my diary, "What the elites are trying to steal from us, and why", I quoted from economist Dean Baker's recent article, "When Wall Street Rules, We Get Wall Street Rules", including the following two crucial paragraphs:
No progressive movement will make any progress until we understand the battle we are fighting. Our income is a cost to the rich. They will look to cut it wherever they can, whether this is wages for private sector workers, pensions for public employees, or Social Security for retirees. That is their target.
We have to fight back using the same logic. Their income is our cost -- the multimillion dollar bonuses for the Wall Street wizards is a direct drain on the economy. So are the bloated paychecks of top executives and their lackey boards. Progressives must be prepared to use all the same tactics to bring down the income of the rich and powerful that they have used to reduce the income of everyone else.
Regarding the bolded passage, I then wrote:
Keep that passage in front of you at all times, and you'll save yourself enormous amounts of grief.
Not least of all, it will help you recognize when someone's trying to distract you by pitting you against some other poor soul who's in exactly the same sort lose/lose negative sum situation that you are. Pitting one generation against another? Workers and/or taxpayers from one state against another? Employed against unemployed? Insured against uninsured? Oil rig workers against fishermen? (Especially when both are one and the same workers!) All these and more just different forms of the same class war game, the oldest one in the book: Let's you and him fight.
Oaktown Girl later wrote a comment picking up on this, along with a comment by VLaszlo quoting from a similarly themed piece by Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford.
She wrote:
Regarding different types of workers being pitted against one another: What's most upsetting to me is the "war" between workers with decent wages and benefits against those without. More and more, people without the fair wages and benefits see those who have them as overly privileged. So instead of saying, "Hey! We want those good wages and benefits too!", they're saying,"Hey! How come they get those sweet wages and benefits when the rest of us don't? The rest of us don't get that, so why should they?"
There are, of course, multiple casualties for this attitude which has steadily gained steam in post-Reagan era, and which seems to get stronger every year. But regardless of what's to blame, it's clear that not only have people forgotten how to fight for something better, or that they even can fight for something better, worst of all they've forgotten that they even deserve something better - and that "something" is a key part of what used to be seen as the basic social contract of this "great" country of ours.
This is a very important point, and well worth devoting another diary to. I can think of a number of different examples of when the the right wing has actively worked to pit one group of workers against another like this. The first was their attack on the United Auto Workers, when conservatives were actively advocating for the destruction of the American auto industry. The second was a lot less high profile, but it's more long-lasting attack on public employees. And the third is the more recent attack on the unemployed, particularly those who decline to take jobs that pay so little they will lead to inevitable banksuptcy. Let's take a more detailed look at what this conservative strategy looks like in action....
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