Why should you pay attention to the hubbub that is happening in Wisconsin right now? Are you frustrated that so many public sector employees currently receive much better benefits than you do Mr. or Ms. Private Sector? Does it strike you as unfair that their future well being is taken care of as they are set to receive relatively generous pensions while you not only will not get a pension when you retire but you aren’t sure if you are even going to have a job next week?
These are valid but misguided feelings. Paul Krugman makes a very compelling argument that we need to pay attention to what our government did in Bagdad in 2003 to truly understand what Gov. Walker is doing in WI right now and why Unions are being unfair demonized. From the article:
The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book “The Shock Doctrine,” which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, “right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.”
Klein’s statement rings very true because in all of the oxygen that has been given to the “unions are evil” rants that you’ve heard so much of these days, no one has ever said that if the ultra-rich just paid their fair share in taxes, then we would have more than enough money to pay for our pension commitments. The George W. Bush tax cuts to the rich which were supposed to expire somehow haven’t yet and the great redistribution of wealth from the lower, middle and even upper classes to the upper-upper class, a.k.a the wealthiest of the wealthy, continues unabated since Reagan started this trend back in 1980.
Here is more from the article:
[It is] an attempt to exploit the fiscal crisis to destroy the last major counterweight to the political power of corporations and the wealthy. And the power grab goes beyond union-busting….For example, the bill includes language that would allow officials appointed by the governor to make sweeping cuts in health coverage for low-income families without having to go through the normal legislative process.
Wow. How is the MSM not reporting these facts? It is because somehow the powers that be, the ultra-rich, have been able to turn the masses against each other, distracting them from their real targets, namely the Koch Brothers, the Chamber of Commerce and other all of the other organizations that basically want us to return to an almost jungle-like primal state.
In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes postulates what life would be like without government, a condition which he calls the state of nature. In that state, each person would have a right, or license, to everything in the world. This, Hobbes argues, would lead to a “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes) Hobbes’ description contains what has been called one of the most best known passages in English philosophy; which describes the natural state mankind would be in, were it not for political community:
In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
I feel that many if not most Republicans, and every single Tea Party person, wants our country to get back to a place where most would have solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short lives, while the privileged few would be chowing down on cucumber sandwiches all day long.
Post idea via Brian, data via Wikipedia
