Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

By Charlie Barber
Contributing Writer

“When the [Constitutional] Convention was all over and Benjamin Franklin went through its doors for the last time, he was approached by an old lady who said: ‘Well, Doctor, what have we got, a Republic or a Monarchy?’ [He replied] ‘A Republic, madam, if you can keep it.’” - Alistair Cooke,  America

“You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” - Attr. to Abraham Lincoln

“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” - Jay Gould

The only thing to despair is despair itself.

The good news is that the Nazi pattern of autocracy does not really fit the American model of everyday defiance of authority.

The bad news is that we have been engaged in something typically American, a political civil war, ever since Ronald Reagan began to destroy labor unions in the PATCO strike of thirty years ago.

While Michael Moore sees the firing of those airline workers as the death knell of the middle class, I do not. But since 1981 there has been a long downward spiral tipping the balance of power from the working middle class in this country in the direction of the favored few. The PATCO firings began a concerted effort to destroy the American middle class by a large portion of the moneyed class.

First the destruction of a labor union taking an unpopular stand for its economic needs, causing inconvenience. Then, slice by slice, more middle class rights and income were lost to the wealthy.

Thirty years later we see an assault on public employees who were not on strike at all. They simply have money in pension funds that unscrupulous men like Governor Walker of Wisconsin and his backers, the Koch Brothers, want to get their hands on.
Virtually all strikes cause inconvenience. That is the point. If they did not cause inconvenience, management would never feel pressure to settle.

Very few folks actually enjoy going out on strike. It is only because they are falling behind in their ability to provide for themselves and their families. Before the Wagner Act of 1935, working Americans were simply set upon by hired goons, sometimes shot. That’s what turning back the clock on the right to strike really means. Once American workers could peacefully bargain collectively, their incomes rose and they entered the middle class along with doctors, lawyers, merchants, and even a few chiefs who found their sons and daughters fit to marry. One was Ronald Reagan.

Reagan changed from labor supporter to labor betrayer and now Republicans Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and the Tea Party of Michelle Bachmann want to undo all of it,—in the name, of course, of “protecting American middle class values.”

“What’s in your wallet?”

In a series of essays entitled “Two Cheers for Democracy [1951],” the novelist E.M. Forster laid out prescriptions for maintaining freedom and democracy that are well worth reading today. One honored Voltaire, a contemporary of our Founding Fathers said: “...if a man believes in liberty and variety and tolerance and sympathy he cannot breathe the air of the totalitarian state.”

There are signs that Americans now realize the air of freedom we had taken for granted has become terribly polluted by propaganda that destroys our ability to effectively communicate with one another. We also grasp that legislation and business practices are destroying our ability to make and maintain a decent standard of living.

Opponents of middle class democracy fit the profile of yesteryear. They are men and women who despise freedom for others, but worship it for themselves.

Freedom is a burden. It has responsibilities. But to be meaningful in a democracy, freedom must be shared. No one in a democratic country is totally free while others suffer chains of economic deprivation. That is why those who believe only in democracy for themselves, like Eric Cantor and Rick Berg, have so much contempt for the American people. They don’t want to share benefits of government and appeal to fear, greed, and moral laziness, in order to persuade us to join them.

Fortunately, there are a number of encouraging signs that Americans are rising to the challenges made by autocracy to their democracy.

Presidential Leadership

All democracies require strong leadership in order to survive. Not all of the time, but certainly in times of crisis like nowadays.

President Obama has exercised leadership from the day he took office, but his opposition has done all they can to deny it, and friends and allies have been slow to appreciate it. Americans are beginning to recognize it. When he recently said that he was willing to risk being a “one term President,” even the major media were forced to realize that he was unafraid to lead in the interest of the nation.

Pundits struggle to pigeon hole the President into “channeling” one President or another - Abraham Lincoln; Ronald Reagan. His supporters urge him to “channel” Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, or even Teddy Roosevelt.

Reporters would do well to consult Barack Obama’s own books for his political role model, and they will discover that he is Mayor Harold Washington of Chicago [1983-1987], a black man, a social and economic progressive, and a fiscal conservative.

If “cuts” to Medicare, as advocated in the Lieberman-Coburn Bill before the U.S. Senate, are simply raising the age to 67, and raising rates for premiums, they are not really cuts in the programs themselves. A medical friend of mine allowed that the average life span of a man at the time of the enactment of Medicare in the mid-1960’s was 70 and nowadays is 75. For women it was 75 then and near 80 now. Raising the age of eligibility for lifetime care by two years therefore makes actual sense, though it is political dynamite for the President with large portions of his Democratic base.

President Obama has shown the courage to do this, just as Harold Washington did in cutting back on spending practices by previous Mayors that benefitted the well connected in Chicago’s “machine,” but not the fiscal well being of the city, or its citizens.

Although his efforts are being largely unsung, jobs ARE being created around the country by President Obama’s policies, not just by oil and gas in North Dakota. His challenge to Detroit to build energy efficient cars in this country was not a bailout of past mistakes, but an investment in America’s future. Those with new jobs will remember.

What Left Wing?

A belief in progress is not a left wing conspiracy. Liberals support programs which help all Americans - Social Security, Medicare, and the like. Right wing conservatives do not. That does not put liberals on the left. They are, in fact, smack in the middle on these issues, and ordinary folks are beginning to see this.

Thus Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker, the man who would be King of the destroyers of public employees, is having a bad time of it in the Badger State as Wisconsin’s “cheese heads” are showing they are not the “block heads” that Walker and the Koch Brothers took them for.
With two recall wins, Democrats delivered a crippling blow to Governor Walker’s working majority in the Senate on Aug. 9 and sent a message that when Republican politicians hurt working families, voters will punish them—even in Republican areas.

The use of progressive tools like recall and referendum by the right wing to defeat middle class democracy has been well outlined by the distinguished journalist David Broder in Democracy Derailed. In Wisconsin this major weapon for ordinary people against the extraordinarily wealthy is back in the hands of those who need it.

Also, a major source for slander of liberalism, Rupert Murdoch, has overreached himself and is being set back in the dismantling of parts of his vast media Empire.

Successful and Sensible Women

Women have as much right to be as foolish as men, of course, but the history of gender bias shows us that women of sense and sensibility have rarely been allowed into the upper regions of politics and the economy, until the past few years.

Though relatively unheralded, the diplomacy of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has brought greater and greater results for the United States in regions of the world like the Middle East where women are decidedly not treated with great respect.

Locally we were brought some bad news by a very important woman in the federal government: Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. She told us the truth about the federal government not having “deep pockets” for each and every weather related disaster, but diplomatically refrained from mentioning what no one in North Dakota dared to bring up at that point—the billion dollar surplus in the North Dakota Treasury, figures easily confirmed by our Budget Director Pam Sharp.

It is no surprise that Barack Obama has made great use of competent women. His political role model, Harold Washington, did the same. He appointed a black woman as his budget director to begin the policies that restored Chicago’s bond ratings and stemmed white flight and white dollars to the suburbs. He appointed a Norwegian American woman as head of Streets and Sanitation, one of the largest patronage bureaucracies in the city. Under her guidance streets were fixed all over the city, without deprivation of “white” Wards as was commonly feared, or cheered, at the time.

Also, Harold increased female city employees to 50% by the time he died in office. At a re-election rally in 1987, he quipped: “watch out guys, the gals can count better.”

Activist Young People

Revolutions, like the continuing American Revolution, are advanced, sustained, or derailed by each generation of young people. Fortunately young people are back from 2008 to fight for their own future. It is a pleasure for me to work with them here in North Dakota in the Democratic/NPL and around the country by Internet.

Benefactors of Great Wealth

Not all extremely wealthy folks in the United States are shortsighted and greedy.

That is one of the most fundamental differences between our democracy and Weimar Germany,
but one of the least appreciated by progressives or their enemies.

In Chicago 100 years ago, citizens would have lost their magnificent lakefront to the Donald Trumps of that day, if it were not for the clout of Montgomery Ward and other wealthy Chicagoans, who made sure that Grant Park stayed open to one and all.

Nowadays we have Ted Turner, George Soros, Warren Buffett, and a host of other “benefactors of great wealth” lining up with the rest of us against the malefactors of great wealth. It is almost a fair fight.

Vigilance with Civility, not Nastiness

Vigilance is the price of liberty, but extreme partisan tactics and character assassination by Republican campaign literature are not the way to keep it.

I received a fundraising letter from the Michelle Bachmann campaign recently.

The piece is addressed to “Dear Conservative Friend,”

Bachmann is right. I am conservative, a better conservative than she is.

I want to conserve the ability of average Americans to have access to opportunity, not just give breaks to rich people like she does.

I want to conserve a woman’s right to have a child when SHE chooses, not when Michelle Bachmann chooses her to have one.

I want to conserve America’s environment from coal and switch to alternative energies: wind, natural gas - nuclear power from waste recycling like AREVA in France - to diminish the certainly of lung pollution and probability of radical climate change.

I want to conserve ALL 10 of the Bill of Rights, not just the 2nd Amendment.

I hope Congresswoman Bachmann keeps sending me mail. I plan to take her as seriously as I take all enemies of middle class democracy.

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