Author: Natasha Chart

This is how Democrats should use Reagan’s words. To give credit where it’s due, Obama’s speech this past Sunday at MLK’s own Ebenezer Baptist church lifted Reaganesque language and put it in a progressive context that I can only applaud. Emphasis mine:

… I’m talking about a moral deficit. I’m talking about an empathy deficit. I’m taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother’s keeper; we are our sister’s keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.

… We are told that those who differ from us on a few things are different from us on all things; that our problems are the fault of those who don’t think like us or look like us or come from where we do. The welfare queen is taking our tax money. The immigrant is taking our jobs. The believer condemns the non-believer as immoral, and the non-believer chides the believer as intolerant.

… We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity. …

The public wasn’t concerned about how government had “grown and grown” until Reagan made government a symbolic stand-in for brown people, poor people, ‘lazy’ people, immigrants (who were also lazy, except when stealing our jobs,) gays and uppity women.

And if you think you know better what Reagan’s Big Government meant to white voters than a white, Reaganite, working class, minister’s daughter from Los Angeles, please think about that again.

That son of Cain’s whole candidacy, presidency even, was a big, long screed on how we are not our brother’s keeper, straight from the heart of John Birch country in Orange County, CA, home to one of blue America’s most infamously racist police forces. (Because my home state is more than hippies and actors Grand Central.) How the poor and colored were leaches on (hardworking, white, straight) society that white people could then feel pious about not wanting to help with ‘my tax money.’

Reagan turned robber baron feudalism-turned-capitalism, a doctrine whose basic premise is that all men are absolutely not equal, into a state religion. And through that ‘faith,’ he blessed, whitewashed, if you will, the scapegoating hate of the multitudes who were fearful of economic circumstances that had spiralled beyond their control.

It isn’t necessary in my mind for a Democratic candidate to blast Reagan as a man, as it has been suggested I wanted to hear. I don’t think that would accomplish anything. But the arguments he made as a president still run the tables in the press and they must not be strengthened by carelessness, nor the the hatred and fear they represent be absolved, by Democrats and progressives.

If Obama will walk that back, and he did it here with some great care, then so will I.

1. Barack Obama was a good progressive when he was an organizer and state legislator in Illinois and has a good telecom policy.

2. John Edwards has done a tremendous amount of work to highlight inequality and corporate power in our society and has a good agricultural policy.

3. Hillary Clinton has worked for many years on the good side of a spectrum of human rights issues and has a decent energy plan.

Now your turn. Can you come up with something genuinely nice to say on issues that matter to you, not a backhanded compliment, about each of our Democratic frontrunners? I know you can.

“… I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. …” – Barack Obama, 1-16-08

Ronald Reagan. Oh yeah, that guy.

Reagan turned thousands of mentally ill institutional patients out into the street, among his other crimes against humanity. How is a future president who’s hailed Reagan’s tradition of laying waste to useful government services that had “grown and grown”, while demonizing both those services and those who partook of them, supposed to fix health care? How is this quote going to sound on Press the Meat when Tim Russert trots it out on the hypothetical eve of the rollout of Obama’s health care legislation?

And it’s rich to complain about racism but then praise the policies of a man who created the myth of the Welfare Queen and started his campaign for president in a place of infamy. Or to complain about people mentioning one’s youthful drug use and then embrace someone who gave us a war on drugs that’s been a full on witch hunt against minorities and the poor, ever since.

A statement like this would have finished either Clinton or Edwards as candidates because of what Reagan’s legacy did to the lower income and minority voters that are the base of the party. It would have finished either of them with the creative class voters flocking to Obama now, the final ‘proof’ that they were phonies and establishment sock puppets, everyone’s worst suspicions confirmed at last. Hillary Clinton isn’t worth voting for because of something a supporter said, but Obama will get a pass for something that came out of his own mouth.

But that’s the way of it. These sorts of telling moments never hurt the party’s many conservative-coddling Lieberdems.

The Republicans pitch Michigan on the economy. Which is to say that Romney and McCain are presenting their messages via this article, while the despised Huckabee, winner of the Iowa caucus, gets only the briefest of mentions.

The Democrats outbid each other on economic stimulus packages. Which is to say, in keeping with the media blackout on the populist Edwards, Clinton and Obama are portrayed as competing solely with each other over economic stimulus.

Toyota will offer plug-in hybrids for lease by 2010, though they’re not sure how much demand there is for them. Did they hear the news that their hybrid Prius passed Ford’s Explorer SUV in 2007 sales? I suspect there might be some demand out there. Also, perhaps 330 mpg competition.

Frustrated in his efforts to gin up an excuse for another war, President Bush criticizes Iran with pro-democracy boilerplate that no longer enthuses anyone. I think there’s only one sort of response appropriate to hearing the vote-caging, election-stealing, nation-destroying Bush ramble on about the joys democracy.

The recreation of beating hearts in a lab is an incredible step forward in science. Hot damn. Can you imagine a world where the need for organ transplants were reduced to emergency cases only?

A 95th Indonesian dies of bird flu. That ongoing story gets no happier.

An injunction has been issued against sweeping personal investigations of low-level NASA employees who don’t have access to classified information.

Some rare good news on the intellectual property front, as several multinational technology companies declare an Eco-Patent Commons to put green technology patents into the public domain. This is the sort of step that could greatly ease tensions between industrialized and developing nations when discussing climate change mitigation, as it could allow them to skip intermediary stages of dirtier development. It might not work that way, but in theory, it could.

BooMan pointed out that Edwards’ message isn’t resonating with the natural constituencies that you’d think it would: hyper-partisan and low income voters.

I’ve heard people say that it’s because Edwards is appealing to fear or anger and it turns people off, but I think that misses the point. Then there’s the fact that he doesn’t get much press coverage at all, and that almost gets it right. He’s angry and uses fear in a way that turns the press off, so no one else gets to hear what he says. Why, though?

Let me suggest that one of the reasons Democrats have a hard time pushing fear messages is because they’re accorded second-class status by the press. Defining what people are supposed to be afraid of is the right of an authority figure, which the media never act like they take Democrats to be. Their disrespectful behavior is evidence enough.

Second class citizens are supposed to be cheerful and uncomplaining. Grateful. If they do complain, they’re either mad or shrill, by default. Their negative reactions are a threat to society, as opposed to defining it, because it isn’t their place to set priorities, to direct efforts or resources.

Be angry means, ‘things should be different.’ Be afraid means, ‘pay attention to this.’

It’s telling people what you think their priorities should be. The media would rather have conservatives set their priorities, the people whose authority they respect. No pissant liberals have the right to tell them anything.
So I simply don’t buy that the voters are done with fear, even though they no longer especially trust the Republicans, who’ve been dining out on it for ages. ‘Oh, people have fear fatigue.’ Right. What’s Lou Dobbs selling, after all? Fear of foreigners and brown people. It’s going like hotcakes.

Part of the problem might be that people can only focus on so many things at once, no matter how many topics they care about. It’s the difference between importance and urgency. Urgency is usually measured in line with the number of times an issue is raised in someone’s life, especially in the press. Even the people reading this, who probably have a longer than average personal list of important political issues, can only focus on a small set of them.

Edwards is trying to sell fear of corporations. Now, people don’t like them, sure, but it’s a rare political opinion that anyone should be afraid of corporations, or angry about the way they’re integrated into our lives.

The public notoriously tends not to politicize issues that aren’t explicitly politicized by a plurality of politicians and the press. They tend to think it’s just them, or maybe a few of their buddies, and hey, there’s always that *one* guy in Congress with the wacky platform. Politics are the things politicians and pundits talk about, all else is just life.

Further, the media choose stand-alone story formats that encourage people to think about things in isolation, as opposed to tying stories in with larger narrative arcs that encourage people to think of issues as systemic concerns. One story about a problem with Blue Cross coverage is a damn shame, how unfortunate, Seinfeld reruns are up next. A series of stories about problems tied to their routine occurence within the Murder By Spreadsheet insurance industry is a big social problem, a call to action.

The media won’t let anyone’s anti-corporate message be repeated enough to be fully politicized, they won’t be party to an education on the issue. They may even describe a candidate as populist, but in their mouths, it’s a rarely elaborated insult that’s now the same as calling someone an unscrupulous demagogue. And they can usually get away with it without having to face any pent up anger.

Because it isn’t that people just want to feel good, it’s that they want to feel in control. The establishment political class have learned how to make people feel they’re in control without giving them any. Reagan was sunny, yes. He also had a message of ostensible empowerment that people liked hearing and that wasn’t a threat to anyone powerful. It was just snake oil. ‘I will empower you to shop and not give a damn about your neighbor, who will in turn not have to give a damn about you.’

That’s the sort of empowerment the corporate media likes. The kind that keeps the peasants happy, but still peasants.

Yet Reagan, too, trafficked in fear and anger. Fear of brown people, poor people, and foreigners. Which somehow never made him a ‘negative’ candidate, because he had happy things to say about a social order dominated by racist, sexist, authoritarian corporate aristocrats. Anger at a supposedly interfering government that was keeping the rich man down. And you, you could be rich, too, if it wasn’t for the frakking Fed.

The establishment press continues to be the main, if not only, source most people have for political news. And we know who they work for. Their function is not to inform, it’s to narcotize. Not to challenge society, but to reinforce its existing authority structures.

Edwards’ message threatens their paymasters. It’s never going to get out on their watch.

It took a UK paper to finally publish former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds’ claims of corruption and national security breaches at the highest levels of the US government that include the selling of nuclear secrets to hostile countries and the release of 9/11 suspects at the request of a compromised official. It’s worse than you want to know.

The GOP primary candidates as their Buffyverse villain alter-egos. Hilarious.

A Feministing year.

The British have a better standard of living, and the Germans have a lower unemployment rate (if you measure it the right way), than citizens of the US. Go us. (h/t)

The rhetoric of leadership may be what’s helping Obama’s campaign pull away from the pack.

Lessons from 2008 in four parts, with more to come: Limbo ahead. The dreams we need, or, “after that, nothing happened.” Where are our leaders, or, the end of the management era. Denial means that the change will be more painful when it comes, and it will.

The Democratic candidates have been outbidding each other on global warming policy. It’s about time.

More links about why everything is screwed up.

Maureen Dowd is still an idiot, and one of the people in politics who gives grievance a bad name. If you’re going to go to all the bother of despising people, let it at least be for a good reason. Takes a lot of energy.

Erm, no, the HPV vaccine isn’t strangely painful. It’s just painful. Vaccinations hurt. I just got my tetanus and flu shots last month, and bloody hell, the tetanus one deprived me of the ability to raise my left arm for three days.

Five rudely obvious things we learned from Iowa.

moar funny pictures

You probably remember this revelation about the pre-9/11 wiretapping, and how it landed the CEO of Qwest in jail because he refused to break the law:

… Newly-unsealed court documents related to former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio’s appeal on convictions of insider trading, show Nacchio claimed Qwest was asked by the federal government as early as February 2001 to participate in a classified program, which reports suggests was the National Security Agency’s domestic wiretapping program. The request, Nacchio said, occurred while Qwest was being considered for lucrative government telecom contracts. Qwest refused to participate in the program, and later that year, according to Nacchio, the government declined to award Qwest the contracts. The failure to land those contracts, which Nacchio had come to expect Qwest would win, played an integral part in the revenue slide that was at the center of the insider trading charges on which Nacchio was convicted. …

Today, the Democratic National Convention Committee announced their choice for a telecommunications provider for the convention in a press release:

The Democratic National Convention Committee (DNCC) and Denver-based Qwest Communications International Inc. (NYSE: Q) announced today that Qwest has been named as the official telecommunications provider for the 2008 Democratic National Convention, to be held Aug. 25-28 in Denver. In that role, Qwest will provide the network and people to help link the Convention to a nationwide and worldwide audience.

“Qwest has been a longtime partner of the Denver business community – and today we are proud to call them our partner, too,” said Leah D. Daughtry, CEO of the DNCC. “Qwest’s state-of-the-art network and skilled union labor force will play a significant role in helping us deliver a spectacular event to the American people and media outlets around the world.” …

The release didn’t say anything about the wiretapping issue, just the Denver connections. Still, it seems a fine thing that they picked the one provably responsible corporate citizen to reward with the job. Good for them.

BooMan wonders why any progressive would support Hillary Clinton. Well, considering that I did endorse Hillary Clinton, I suppose I should be willing to step up and explain myself.

As I said …

… And while I’ve mostly been able to tune the candidates out, I haven’t been able to get away from the persistent annoyances of their attackers. OMFG, a millionaire lawyer who doesn’t go to Supercuts, even though he gives a damn about people who’ve seen the business end of a food stamp! Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat, a multi-ethnic lawyer who went to a funny school in a foreign country and has a name that doesn’t just scream One White Guy! Holy Cannoli, Batman, a female lawyer who’s gotten high dollar campaign contributions from the lobbyists of the industries whose executives just give to her opponents directly!

Unfortunately for me, and for you if you’re not a Clinton fan, some of the most annoying critiques of Clinton come from the blogosphere. That, I can’t tune out, which is probably why they annoy me so much. Everyone notices the pebble in their own shoe. Alternately, there’s the rank sexism, though that mostly comes from the pundits.

So, because I’ve already included her in my blanket endorsement of whatever Democrat wins, and because it may give people like David Mizner and Chris Matthews screaming fits of high-pitched apoplexy, which will greatly comfort me when stupid Democratic policies are driving me up a wall; I hereby endorse Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. …

It was a choosing-against choice, come to it. Since I made that decision, I’ve felt ever more justified in it as regards Obama, wavered over Edwards, and at present feel just fine about it. I haven’t wanted to criticize the candidates too terribly much, believe me when I say I’ve exercised restraint, but I’m feeling better about that, too, these days. Particularly for the mostly inside baseball things that I don’t see hurting anyone in the general, because the media and the larger electorate never seem bothered to care about them.

BooMan’s main critique of Clinton, that she is not progressive, I will not contest. It’s a point unworthy of serious debate. Is Obama progressive? I think not. Is Edwards? It seems to be the case. More on that in a bit.

Is electability an issue for me? Piffle. I think all three of them are electable. Which is to say that given a competently executed campaign, it seems likely to me that a majority of voters would be willing to pull the lever for them.

Aside from policy, which as I explained in my endorsement, none of these candidates meets my bar for, what’s important to me? In a word, partisanship. In another, boldness. Only one candidate has demonstrated both qualities to my satisfaction.

When I say partisanship, it must be obvious that this criterion disqualified Obama almost at once, though I really tried to like him. Paul Krugman recently said it best in his argument for why progressives should abandon all thoughts of bipartisanship. It may admittedly have been premature to pronounce his candidacy dead in October on those grounds, but the more I’ve seen of his campaign, the less I’ve liked him. And the more I’ve heard his supporters whine about how everyone who doesn’t support him is a sell-out, with particular venom for the bloggers who formerly supported the very partisan Gov. Dean, my regard for his campaign has plummeted even further.

From conversations I’ve had in person with his supporters, I feel that Obama is directly responsible for lowering the political IQ of many Democrats and potential progressives. He’s given the whole damn party a Pulp Fictionesque adrenalin shot to the heart of Broderistic pap. Bi-frakking-partisanship. You know what bipartisanship means right now in this country? The real country that we actually live in, and not some post-postmodernist, nihilistic, asemantic, college bull session fantasy?

Bipartisanship means that at least some of the Democrats are trying to build a life raft, while the Republicans and the conservative Democrats are trying to build underwater mines: now you crazy kids go work together and see what you come up with.

I do understand why people might support Obama, he does have a lot else to recommend him. I’m not accusing people who do support him of not being real Democrats or progressives. He’s just not my first choice and barely my fifth. (Fifth? Yeah. Neither of my first two choices are running. Vote in the primary ‘with my heart’? Not possible.)

Then, there’s boldness. I like Edwards’ policies a lot, as I mentioned. But he has never erased my disappointment in him over his performance in the VP debate with Cheney in 2004 after all the hype about his great skills as a closer in the courtroom. Cheney wiped the floor with him. Cheney. One of America’s most anti-charismatic, dodgy, creepy and unlikeable political figures. It’s like losing a debate to Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Corrupt Bastards Club). How does something like that even happen?

It would be fair to say that the debate was three years ago, and Edwards has been through a lot since then. People grow. It’s true, they can. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, I’m a different person than I was three years ago, and thank goodness. Means I haven’t embalmed myself alive yet, is what.

Then, Edwards hired a couple of bloggers. And not just a couple people to blog, but a couple people who became known for blogging out on their own in the big, scary Intertubes. Big score for boldness. And for bloggers. Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan being wicked cool, to boot, bigger score. And so I thought, ‘Damn, he must have one impressive defense ready for when they get attacked over that.’

Silly me.

As became obvious when the Edwards campaign was inevitably attacked over that, they acted as though no one could possibly have predicted that this would happen. I mean, who’d have guessed that hiring irreverent, outspoken feminists who’ve written thousands upon thousands of words about their irreverent feminism would have said things in the past that some utterly insane fundamentalist whackjob would take public issue with in a way that would instantly capture the attention of every Faux News hack and wanna-be in the continental United States? Who could have seen that coming? Like, besides anyone with a pulse.

And then he really blinked, waiting days to put out a tepid defense and apology. Did the campaign challenge Donohue’s moral authority on the basis of his being an anti-gay, antisemitic bigot who isn’t even a semi-official representative of the Catholic church? No. Did they send out a bold, public call for those attacking the bloggers to denounce the people making death and rape threats against them and stalking them at their homes? No. Did they punt and leave Donohue roaming free and unwounded, to fight again another day? You betcha.

Guess what I think of Edwards’ ability to really walk through the fire for me or my issues.

The Edwards campaign also announced that they’d be running on public financing in the general, again repeating the mistake of the 2004 presidential campaign. If he doesn’t have money for ads between the primaries and the convention, given the media narrative handling skills I observed during the blogger fiasco, how’s he going to defend himself against the inevitable attacks? If he wins, how is he going to handle even the Bush dogs?

It isn’t enough in presidential politics to believe the right things, unfortunately. Then when they’re only mostly the right things and you’ve not demonstrated to me that you’ll defend them well, my support won’t be a given.

By elimination, there’s Clinton.

The lobbyist thing is a non-issue for me, though Edwards’ recent, and better placed, identification of corporate power as the problem is attractive. I don’t like her hawkishness on Iran, though I think she’s realistic and sensible enough that the recent NIE will be enough to keep her future policy towards that country on an even keel. Her energy policy is all right, though I worry about her on agriculture. For women’s rights and education, she’ll be as good as any and better than most. She defended the liberal blogs and the DailyKos community before YearlyKos when Bill O’Reilly tried demonizing us all, so while she’s no big blog booster and knows she isn’t popular in this set, she didn’t kick us to the curb for easy points. She doesn’t attack liberals from the right, as far as I can tell. And she won’t pretend to us to be something she isn’t, even if there are questions she doesn’t want to answer, because I think we all know why that is.

Clinton has already had to stand the heat of national politics. That’s also not something that I think is up for reasonable debate. I think she’s made some wrong decisions, but she’s not a pushover and she’s not a backstabber. She’s smart and tough and won a lot more people over than the pessimists thought she could.

She has character, vigor, and a spine, and the few occasions when I’ve been in the same room with her, though I’ve never so much as shaken her hand, I had a good impression of her as a person.

So yeah, I would consider myself a progressive who stands by an endorsement of Clinton. At the same time, the work ahead of progressives to fill Congress with better Democrats, to reform the media, to awaken civil society and arouse the political capital to solve the planetary emergency of climate change, is a task of huge proportions. It’s the job of everyone who cares about these issues to think about how to generate a public outcry so great that new political realities will emerge in which public servants have room to do things that seem crazy now. Like passing and signing laws against opening new coal-fired power plants, which not even Al Gore himself would be able to get past this Congress.

I’m not afraid of Hillary Clinton, or any of the other Democrats. My only real fear is that enough people might not be shaken out of apathy. That we will spend so much time looking up at the politicians that we won’t look around at how to build our communities into forces for positive, collective action. Again, and again, and again, no one is coming to save us from on high. No one.

How much do you want to win? After the dust of the primaries settles, that question will remain with us. The challenges we face are too much for one person. Or for 535 people who are constantly having to beg for more money in a year than you or I are ever likely to earn. We have a planetary emergency to solve, and it’s going to require the shared help of everyone who cares about what happens more than 10 years from now, even if every member of Congress and the president besides woke up one morning and took James Hansen seriously.

My only request of any progressive is this: don’t be afraid of the wrong things. There isn’t time.

Adding immunity for the telecoms that engaged knowingly in warrantless wiretapping to the FISA bill brings up an interesting question to which we will all shortly know the answer. Consider …

This is the oath of federal office taken by all members of the House and Senate:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

This is the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

This is Sen. Patrick Leahy asking White House staffer Sara Taylor some questions about where her loyalties lie as a federal employee who took an oath comparable to his:

The question is: Which Senators take their oath of office seriously, and which ones think it’s only a party trick to spring on Republican dittoheads?

“My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total.” – Rep. Barbara Jordan

I’m still sick. And tired. I usually run out of steam these days by the time I get to email and a little news. So not many links, and I’m pretty much typing with my eyes closed because they keep going bleary.

I know that there are horrible things going on in the world right now. With people being tortured and global warming spiraling out of control like the home foreclosure wave. Also, I hear that the Republicans are having a debate in Spanish in which they demonstrate that they have the courage of their convictions to hate brown people. Good times.

And you may say to yourself, “Self, I’m not sure what I can do about all these things, or if I can do anything about them. It would be nice if there was a place to start.”

As it happens, you’re in luck. The Writers’ Guild is still on strike and the studio bosses have walked away from the negotiating table. An extra $0.04 per DVD and a share of the billions the studios are raking in off the internet was apparently too much to ask of the bloated distributors who package and promote their original work. So at the end of this post, there’ll be a link that takes you to where you can write a letter to the producers of your favorite show, telling them that you’d like the people who write it to get a fair share of the show’s earnings.

What does that have to do with anything important?

One of the basic forms of social justice is paying someone what their work is worth. That’s one of the key differentiators between freedom and slavery.It’s the way the people who invest capital are supposed to reward the people who invested labor and made their money worth more. To not pay someone what their work is worth is a hallmark of discrimination, because most forms of bigotry can be seen manifestly in economic disparities and pay inequities.

It matters because money is power. The power to provide yourself and maybe a family with the necessities of life. The power to bargain for all the things you need that you can’t make or do yourself. The power to get where you need to go. The power to secure health care.

And the people who have it seem less and less to want to share it with all the other people who helped them earn it. Because really, does the average CEO or hedge fund manager actually do 400 times as much work as you do? Please. But they do have 400 times as much power. At least.

Over the years, many of them have used a lot of that power to buy lobbyists to pressure Congress against helping your family out with health care, against supporting your public school, against providing decent public transportation, against enforcing food and product safety standards for the things you bring into your house, against enforcing workplace safety standards that would mean they have to keep you safer on the job, and against living wages. They’ve demonized unions because unions are the only organized voice that people who aren’t 400 times more valuable than the average worker had available to argue in opposition.

This, you should remember next time you want to complain about ‘lobbyists’ in Washington who whisper in Congress’ ears so they enact legislation that lets people screw you over with the imprimatur of the law. Lobbyists are people who know stuff about Congress and the law and usually a bureaucracy or two. They’re only enabled to use that power for evil to the extent that some scumbag who thinks they’re worth at least 400 times more than you has hired them and sent them out on a mission to kill your access to the levers of justice.

And you may say to yourself, “Self, wtf is she on about? I thought we were going to talk about the writers’ strike.” Well, we are. We’re going to do it now.

There aren’t a lot of vibrant unions left. There aren’t a lot of unions that can actually get much attention when they try to get their fair share of the earnings of the businesses they build with their daily work.

Often, when they do, that attention is negative. So you might have disgruntled, non-unionized people reading the paper about striking grocery workers before going to their own crappy jobs and wondering why their checkout clerk thinks they should have benefits you can’t even count on in an office job anymore. Which is a shame, because those office jobs used to be better when there were more unions around to raise the bar on how employees were treated.

Think it’s a coincidence that the decline of unions has paralleled the decline in the availability of benefits? It isn’t. Think it’s a coincidence that it’s paralleled the decline in laws that kept jobs in the US so you didn’t have to compete for that call center job with four Costa Ricans whose cost of living is a vanishing fraction of your own? It isn’t.

Unions are supposed to be your lobbyists. To lobby your employer for decent treatment and a fair share of the earnings from the investment of your time. To lobby Congress for laws that make sure your employer can’t risk your life and health and ability to work, which are probably all you have to invest in a business, so that they can cut corners with safety for a better return on their cash investment.

Unions lobby for you. Even if they aren’t your union. When they lose, you lose. Even if they aren’t in your industry.

All these SOBs watch each other like hawks to see just how much they can get away with. To see just how much of your work they can steal. How much of your investment of time they can take without paying for. How low they can go and who they’ll get to hold up as cautionary examples when you come looking for a raise, some benefits, some time off so you can have a life.

As Naomi Klein pointed out in The Shock Doctrine, the union movement in the US never really recovered from Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers. The summary dismissal of thousands of critical public servants was a shot across the bow of any other union headed to the bargaining table.

The typical household wage in the US has been stagnant since the 1970s. Americans no longer believe, as a majority position, that life will be better for their kids than it was for them. I mean, do you believe that? Really?

Employers used to have to compete with the standards of multiple union workplaces, with the public sector whose wages might not have stood out but whose benefits and security were sterling. But there aren’t as many union workplaces. The pay for much public sector work has gotten a lot of downward pressure from Republicans fighting ‘big government’ by cutting the salaries of teachers and firefighters, or the head count for safety inspectors and road repair crews, and other grafters like that who make our civilization work so well that we mostly don’t notice it happening around us.

And you know what else? People in other countries like having unions, too. But the same creeps that have been working for years to destroy unions here make sure the World Bank and IMF put conditions on their loans to cash-strapped countries. Those provisions are forced on governments facing financial crises to make it difficult to impossible to get unions started where they aren’t, and easy to break them where they are. All in the name of progress; which means you having to compete for your job with someone whose society has no workplace protections and where they might get shot for trying to organize and ask for them.

It isn’t complicated. It doesn’t require a conspiracy, everyone’s really been pretty open about it. It’s just that people who have money and the power that comes with it in obscene amounts like keeping it. And they don’t want to share it with all the other people who helped them get it, which unions have a tendency to insist on.

So support the writers’ strike by sending a letter to the producers of your favorite shows. Click on the button below and have at. Let this strike be the one that changes the tide against working people. Let this strike put a face on everyone who’s seen their purchasing power and job security plummet, even as the papers herald record profits for industries of all kinds.

It’d be nice if something went right, for a change.