01.08.11

On Scapegoating

Posted in Stumble and Fail at 10:39 am by George Smith

Pine View Farm draws my attention to the rising scapegoating of middle class union workers. (The embedded vidoes are key so do clikc out there from here.)

Lamentable articles in the New York Times have outlined Republican and Wall Street efforts to attack state unions as root causes of our economic troubles. It seems to do no good to say that unions have been under public attack for a long time and that they’ve been crippled by US business interests.

Those with the money rely on scapegoating and resentment to fuel sentiment against them. The mental equation appealing to baser emotion is simple one: Because those in the private sector have had it very hard, then the middle class union workers left — mostly in state and federal government — need punishing as well.

There have been other ways to describe it, Nitzschean Ressentiment, being one: “[Because] (I or we) have suffered, it is appropriate and good that even more suffer.”

This is pure scapegoating, rationalized as austerity and belt tightening. The President helped fuel it last year when he fecklessly announced federal employee wage freezing after election losses.

“Obama flunks economics with pointless wage freeze,” reads the headline at FiireDogLake, for example.

Pine View Farm quotes from the Guardian, a UK newspaper, where the reporting columnist comments on the tactic:

At the Guardian, Paul Harris comments on the anti-worker frenzy, pointing out the dipsy-doodle to distract persons from the real culprits:

What is perverse about this trend is just how vastly it misunderstands what went wrong with the American economy. No one is denying that this is a time for belt-tightening. Or that some unions have problems. Or that some union contracts look over-generous in austerity America. But the fundamental truth remains: powerful and reckless unions did not cause the Great Recession by rampant speculation. Nor did an out-of-control labour movement cause or burst the housing bubble. It was not union bosses who packaged up complex derivatives to sell in their millions and thus wrecked the economy and put millions out of work. Nor was it union bosses who awarded (and continue to award) themselves salaries worth hundreds of millions of dollars for doing nothing of social value. Neither was it the union movement that was bailed out by the taxpayer and then refused to change its habits.

All that was the work of the finance industry.

One of the New York Times articles obliquely mentioned at the top of the column ran on the 4th.

It revealed the urge and strategy used to whack state union workers across the nation. In California, for example, it has been much the same. Jerry Brown seems poised to not only fire workers but to further cripple the survivors because of the state’s budget mess which has been boiling over for what now seems like an eternity.

Reported the Times:

Some union leaders say that proposals like right-to-work laws, which have little effect on state budgets, show that Republicans are using budget woes as a pretext to undercut unions.

“They’re throwing the kitchen sink at us,??? said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “We’re seeing people use the budget crisis to make every attempt to roll back workers’ voices and any ability of workers to join collectively in any way whatsoever.???

A group composed of Republican state lawmakers and corporate executives, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is quietly spreading these proposals from state to state, sending e-mails about the latest efforts as well as suggested legislative language.

One of the leaders is John Kasich, Ohio’s new governor.

From the Times article, here’s Kasich employing the language of the scapegoater:

Of all the new governors, John Kasich, Republican of Ohio, appears to be planning the most comprehensive assault against unions. He is proposing to take away the right of 14,000 state-financed child care and home care workers to unionize. He also wants to ban strikes by teachers, much the way some states bar strikes by the police and firefighters.

“If they want to strike, they should be fired,??? Mr. Kasich said in a speech. “They’ve got good jobs, they’ve got high pay, they get good benefits, a great retirement. What are they striking for????

Early in 2010, the Times also ran a story discussing the fact that state and federal government workers now make up the most union members in the country, surpassing the private sector. It was not because of some evil intrinsic to government workers. The numbers refllected only that the US private sector had been steadily destroying US manufacturing jobs in the great de-industrialization, a trend accelerated by the mass layoffs brought on by the Great Recession.

It reads, in part:

Gerald W. McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, voiced dismay that government employees now represented a majority of union members.

“It’s a very bad sign,??? he said. “We’ve been banged around some, but when you see what’s been happening to the industrial base of this country, to the steelworkers, to the autoworkers, they’re been hammered much more.???

After rising the two previous years, overall union membership fell by 771,000 in 2009, to 15.3 million, largely because employment declined over all. But the rate of private-sector unionization fell because two sectors where unions are especially strong — manufacturing and construction — suffered especially large job losses. Construction lost more than 900,000 jobs last year, falling to 5.9 million, while 1.3 million factory jobs were lost, declining to 11.6 million.

Kasich had previously kept his face in the public on Fox News. His Wiki bio informs:

In 2001, Kasich took a job as managing director of the Columbus investment banking division of Lehman Brothers. He remained at the company until its collapse in September 2008. During 2008, Lehman Brothers paid Kasich $587,175 in salary, bonuses, and other benefits. Over $400,000 of that bonus is credited to Kasich using his political connections to facilitate investment of $480 Million from the state pension fund with Lehman Brothers.

In a better world, Kasich would still be on Fox News, the regular friendly puppet of Bill O’Reilly. But we don’t live in such a place.

In his book, Class, Paul Fussell had a few things to say about scapegoating and how it is tied to bitterness in the working class. And how easily it turns people on each other. Or perhaps I’m reading too much into it. The book, after all, was written many years ago.

However, I’ve mentioned it from time to time on this domain. And it seems appropriate to close from something back in 2008 on the old blog.

Class war, Fussell noted, was never far from the surface in the United States.

Now it has erupted. But we’re still losing because Wall Street and the Republican Party are adept at turning people’s loathing at the wrong targets.

From then (paradoxically, it was in a post on the common political instigation of class war against candidate Obama:

“Inflation, unemployment, a static economy” have set into stone conditions in which “the mass of Americans now find themselves” moving down. “There used to be room at the top,” [Fussell concluded]. Now there’s plenty of room at the bottom, vicinities near which many of us will become acquainted with, sooner than later.

Just cross out the ‘inflation’ bit.

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