Wisconsin & The GOP's War on the Middle Class

[irishbobcat]

Wisconsin & The GOP's War on the Middle Class
By Terrance Heath


In a post about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's bid to strip public employee unions of collective bargaining — the most important and effective tool for protecting workers — Van Jones wrote:

If a foreign power conspired to inflict this much damage on America's first responders and essential infrastructure, we would see it as an act of war.
It is an act of war, a now all-but-openly-declared war — and not just against unions, but against American workers and against the middle class.

Americans are accustomed to denying even the existence of classes, let alone class conflict. This week America's ongoing class war arrived on our doorstep with the subtlety of a daisy cutter — in the form of Walker's union-busting politics, and the massive protests in Madison and beyond.

Now that the battle is joined, the big questions are what the outcome will be, and whether Democrats will take the opportunity to tell American workers unequivocally whose side they are on.

What we are seeing in Wisconsin is job killing in action, with the goal of eliminating or permanently weakening the middle class. Conservative policies were responsible for the death of American manufacturing and the loss of "good jobs" — jobs with decent wages and benefits that aided the growth of the middle class from the working class.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research defines a "good job" as one with health insurance, a pension plan and earnings of at least $17 per hour. That works out to about $34,000 a year, the inflation-adjusted median income for men in 1979, when U.S. manufacturing jobs numbered 19.6 million, an all-time high.

Since then, however, the economy has lost nearly 6 million manufacturing jobs — 52,000 in February alone. Among them were many of the 3.5 million "good jobs" lost from 2000 to 2006, according to John Schmitt, a senior economist at CEPR.

As those jobs disappeared, many blue-collar workers were forced to take jobs with far less pay and benefit security.

...Helping fuel the loss of good jobs has been a decline in union membership, industry deregulation, increased outsourcing of state and government services and economic policies that focus more on containing inflation than on maintaining full employment, Schmitt said. (Emphasis mine.)
What Conservatives Really Want


Now conservatives have turned their eliminating  what may be the last "good jobs" left in America, in terms of benefits. It's not just public employees and public employee unions conservatives have in their sights, but the very concepts of a common good and a public interest. George Lakoff explained in "What Conservatives Want," a post dedicated to the protesters in Wisconsin (emphasis mine):

Conservatives really want to change the basis of American life, to make America run according to the conservative moral worldview in all areas of life.

...The way to understand the conservative moral system is to consider a strict father family. The father is The Decider, the ultimate moral authority in the family. His authority must not be challenged. His job is to protect the family, to support the family (by winning competitions in the marketplace), and to teach his kids right from wrong by disciplining them physically when they do wrong. The use of force is necessary and required. Only then will children develop the internal discipline to become moral beings. And only with such discipline will they be able to prosper. And what of people who are not prosperous? They don't have discipline, and without discipline they cannot be moral, so they deserve their poverty. The good people are hence the prosperous people. Helping others takes away their discipline, and hence makes them both unable to prosper on their own and function morally.

The market itself is seen in this way. The slogan, "Let the market decide" assumes the market itself is The Decider. The market is seen as both natural (since it is assumed that people naturally seek their self-interest) and moral (if everyone seeks their own profit, the profit of all will be maximized by the invisible hand). As the ultimate moral authority, there should be no power higher than the market that might go against market values. Thus the government can spend money to protect the market and promote market values, but should not rule over it either through (1) regulation, (2) taxation, (3) unions and worker rights, (4) environmental protection or food safety laws, and (5) tort cases. Moreover, government should not do public service. The market has service industries for that.

Thus, it would be wrong for the government to provide health care, education, public broadcasting, public parks and so on. The very idea of these things is at odds with the conservative moral system. No one should be paying for anyone else. It is individual responsibility in all arenas. Taxation is thus seen as taking money away from those who have earned it and giving it to people who don't deserve it. Taxation cannot be seen as providing the necessities of life for a civilized society, and, as necessary, for business to prosper.
The public workers targeted in Wisconsin and others are the same people who make middle-class life and security in America possible. They are the people who ensure our safety, who safeguard our health, and facilitate us getting where we want to go, among other things. They are the police who responded within minutes after our house alarm was set off by a strong wind that blew open a door that lacked a deadbolt lock; the teachers and school staff that helped our son when he needed it; the paramedics who responded quickly when a neighbor's child had trouble breathing; the firefighters who responded when a neighbor detected a gas leak; the bus driver that gets our son to school safely each day; the public transportation workers who get me to work and back home safely each day. The list goes on and on.

When abstract budget cuts translate into fewer teachers, police officers, health workers, firefighters, etc. in our communities, we begin to realize that such cuts hurt rather than heal.

The very necessities that support the existence of a middle class are threatened. They will not be replaced if conservatives are successful in eliminating them. They will not be affordable if privatized. The reason that there are public services supported by public workers is that there are things we believe need doing and should be done even if they're not profitable. Where there is not enough of a profit margin for private industry to see a benefit, and too great a need for charitable entities to meet entirely, it becomes a question of the public interest, requiring a public solution.

We are faced with a conservative movement that not only doesn't believe in a public good but sees it at the biggest of our problems.