Posted on 03/26/2015 8:50:45 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
On Feb. 20, Kamal Abbas, Egyptian union leader and prominent figure in the Jan. 25 movement, sent a message to the “workers of Wisconsin”: “We stand with you as you stood with us.”
Egyptian workers have long fought for fundamental rights denied by the U.S.-backed Hosni Mubarak regime. Kamal is right to invoke the solidarity that has long been the driving force of the labor movement worldwide, and to compare their struggles for labor rights and democracy.
The two are closely intertwined. Labor movements have been in the forefront of protecting democracy and human rights and expanding their domains, a primary reason why they are the bane of systems of power, both state and private.
The trajectories of labor struggles in Egypt in the U.S. are heading in opposite directions: toward gaining rights in Egypt, and defending rights under harsh attack in the U.S.
The two cases merit a closer look.
The Jan. 25 uprising was sparked by the Facebook-savvy young people of the April 6 movement, which arose in Egypt in spring 2008 in “solidarity with striking textile workers in Mahalla,” labor analyst Nada Matta observes.
State violence crushed the strike and solidarity actions, but Mahalla was “a symbol of revolt and challenge to the regime,” Matta adds. The strike became particularly threatening to the dictatorship when workers’ demands extended beyond their local concerns to a minimum wage for all Egyptians.
Matta’s observations are confirmed by Joel Beinin, a U.S. authority on Egyptian labor. Over many years of struggle, Beinin reports, workers have established bonds and can mobilize readily.
When the workers joined the Jan. 25 movement, the impact was decisive, and the military command sent Mubarak on his way. That was a great victory for the Egyptian democracy movement, though many barriers remain, internal and external.
The external barriers are clear. The U.S. and its allies cannot easily tolerate functioning democracy in the Arab world.
For evidence, look to public opinion polls in Egypt and throughout the Middle East. By overwhelming majorities, the public regards the U.S. and Israel as the major threats, not Iran. Indeed, most think that the region would be better off if Iran had nuclear weapons.
We can anticipate that Washington will keep to its traditional policy, well-confirmed by scholarship: Democracy is tolerable only insofar as it conforms to strategic-economic objectives. The United States’ fabled “yearning for democracy” is reserved for ideologues and propaganda.
Democracy in the U.S. has taken a different turn. After World War II the country enjoyed unprecedented growth, largely egalitarian and accompanied by legislation that benefited most people. The trend continued through the Richard Nixon years, which ended the liberal era.
The backlash against the democratizing impact of ‘60s activism and Nixon’s class treachery was not long in coming: a vast increase in lobbying to shape legislation, in establishing right-wing think tanks to capture the ideological spectrum, and in many other measures.
The economy also shifted course sharply toward financialization and export of production. Inequality soared, primarily due to the skyrocketing wealth of the top 1 percent of the population – or even a smaller fraction, limited to mostly CEOs, hedge fund managers and the like.
For the majority, real incomes stagnated. Most resorted to increased working hours, debt and asset inflation. Then came the $8 trillion housing bubble, unnoticed by the Federal Reserve and almost all economists, who were enthralled by efficient market dogmas. When the bubble burst, the economy collapsed to near-Depression levels for manufacturing workers and many others.
Concentration of income confers political power, which in turn leads to legislation that further enhances the privilege of the super-rich: tax policies, deregulation, rules of corporate governance and much else.
Alongside this vicious cycle, costs of campaigning sharply increased, driving both political parties to cater to the corporate sector – the Republicans reflexively, and the Democrats (now pretty much equivalent to the moderate Republicans of earlier years) following not far behind.
In 1978, as the process was taking off, United Auto Workers President Doug Fraser condemned business leaders for having “chosen to wage a one-sided class war in this country – a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society,” and having “broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a period of growth and progress.”
As working people won basic rights in the 1930s, business leaders warned of “the hazard facing industrialists in the rising political power of the masses,” and called for urgent measures to beat back the threat, according to scholar Alex Carey in “Taking the Risk Out of Democracy.” They understood as well as Mubarak did that unions are a leading force in advancing rights and democracy. In the U.S., unions are the primary counterforce to corporate tyranny.
By now, U.S. private-sector unions have been severely weakened. Public-sector unions have recently come under sharp attack from right-wing opponents who cynically exploit the economic crisis caused primarily by the finance industry and its associates in government.
Popular anger must be diverted from the agents of the financial crisis, who are profiting from it; for example, Goldman Sachs, “on track to pay out $17.5 billion in compensation for last year,” the business press reports, with CEO Lloyd Blankfein receiving a $12.6 million bonus while his base salary more than triples to $2 million.
Instead, propaganda must blame teachers and other public-sector workers with their fat salaries and exorbitant pensions – all a fabrication, on a model that is all too familiar. To Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker, to other Republicans and many Democrats, the slogan is that austerity must be shared – with some notable exceptions.
The propaganda has been fairly effective. Walker can count on at least a large minority to support his brazen effort to destroy the unions. Invoking the deficit as an excuse is pure farce.
In different ways, the fate of democracy is at stake in Madison, Wis., no less than it is in Tahrir Square
Ping.
Noam is not too right in the head.
Been that way for a spell.
So, who gives a smelly Obama about emanations from his pie hole?
.....“For years I’ve been concerned about that threat,” Walker said, saying he received security briefings from the FBI and his adjutant general. “I want a commander-in-chief who will do anything in their power to ensure that the threat of radical Islamic terrorists do not wash up on American soil.”
“If I can take on 100,000 protestors, I can do the same across the world,” Walker added, referencing the months of protests in his state over his efforts to limit the power of public sector unions in his state.”...
http://time.com/3725078/scott-walker-unions-isis/
Noam you might as well be co-piloting Germanwings flights
Chumpsky, the human bladder stone strikes again.
Did chomsky not get the memo that the Egyptian spring was a disaster for the minorities in Egypt. And it was basically a millitary coup that helped end most of the persecution of those minorities?
What all this amounts to is the baptism of fire of what I have taken to calling the "liberal superstructure." This superstructure is the vast constellation of advocacy groups, think tanks, single-issue outfits, unions, and various other flotsam constructed by the left over the past half-century or so. There are literally thousands of these groups, ranging from the ACLU and the Sierra Club with their hundreds of thousands of members to the local "Friends of the People's Venezuela" outfit which amounts to a retired feminism professor and her six cats. These organizations are ubiquitous, universal, and networked to a fare-thee- well. They are also liberalism's last great hope of controlling politics in the United States....."
".........As all of this falls under the rubric of electoral politics or inside issue advocacy, it would be remiss to leave out the force that has proven just as vital to any progressive change: outside progressive social movements. We probably can’t make exact predictions about when these movements will emerge, but we can be on the lookout for them and be ready when they make their presence known. It’s safe to say that what whatever comes along will be imperfect and almost certainly an affront to the sensibilities of the Very Serious in style as well as substance....."
The left wouldn’t mind Jeb Bush if the alternative was Cruz.
They will take the Progressive Lite over a Populist Centrist Democrat because then they would have a foil to crucify in the media while the prog lite implements their policies only not a s fast as they wanted...
And lo and behold, look what happened. Those loans started failing. A lot. And companies lost a whole lot of money.
So, yes, popular anger was expressed at the group who caused (and intended to most profit from it) - liberals. They swept them out of Congress, state houses, and even local ballots. Oh, but no, we must focus on ‘wall street bankers’ who are the evil here.
I don't think so. I think we must focus on failed plans by liberals. I think we must make more of those plans utterly fail - such as an everlasting bureaucracy that rules through regulation and answers to no one. I think we need to take on the embezzlement of public funds by public employees who reward themselves for making new and more difficult regulations.
Much was made in another story about how Google’s employees contribute a lot to liberal campaigns - but that is but a drop in the bucket compared to how much public employees fund directly, and indirectly through union dues, the liberal agenda. ‘We must do something about Google’s undue influence’ cry the people, while ignoring how much influences public employees have.
But alas, the real popular uprising happened, and the people said no, we won't take this. We won't let public employee unions remove a sitting governor simply because he's taking their toys away.
We need more popular uprisings, and we need that popular anger directed at what has harmed them the most - the liberal agenda and the bureaucracy that thrives on it. We need to end all ‘pay another day’ compensation for public employees - if you don't have the budget right now to pay for that lavish retirement, you don't get to offer that lavish retirement benefit.
And I personally think that Scott Walker is our best chance at leading that popular uprising. And so do liberals, which is why they are so eager to say how awful Walker is.
Most certainly.
Great comments.
And I will had to your excellent analysis that nowhere in Chomsky’s “scholarship” did I see any mention of the fact that excessive taxation and abusive regulation is harmful to the “workers” - I call them Americans (not folks or workers or working Americans ).
Now we’re really beginning to see how Democrats in this administration have weaponized government to go after conservatives and their businesses, and now governors who refuse to kneel at the altar of “global warming.”
Ah good old Noam....who knew he was really Al Hunt
Stupid leftists never ever seem to let up
And you have to ask, compared to what? Average Americans live immeasurably better lives than when Chomsky first start squawking about "evil capitalists" many decades ago. Did socialism accomplish that? Hardly.
How about unions? Again, with only about ten percent of the total workforce unionized, average Americans live far better than they did during the heyday of unionism which lasted about twenty-twenty-five years or so after WWII.
This will not impede the efforts of Chomsky and his ilk to denounce capitalism as evil. Facts mean nothing to Chomskyites...only the narrative matters, to wit: evil capitalists, the one percent, oppress the vast majority of Americans who are helpless pawns in the grasp of the greedheads. They'll believe this to their deaths.
I think Chomsky would say that these workers aren’t being taxed enough, but that is the fault of the industrialists who are hoarding too much of the money in fat salaries and bonuses, something he spent much time on in his article.
Not surprisingly, he hasn’t brought up the fact that these people work for publicly traded companies, and the shareholders have the power to put an end to these high wages. Mostly because shareholders aren’t all that excited about kneecapping the leaders of companies who produce results and profits.
"....New Left progressives—including Hillary Clinton and her comrade, Acting Deputy Attorney General Bill Lann Lee—were involved in supporting, or protecting or making excuses for violent anti-American radicals abroad like the Vietcong and anti-American criminals at home like the Black Panthers. We did this then—just as progressives still do now—in the name of "social justice" and a dialectical world-view that made this deception appear ethical and the fantasy seem possible.
As a student of the left, Jamie Glazov, has observed in an article about the middle-class defenders of recently captured Seventies terrorist Kathy Soliah: "if you can successfully camouflage your own pathology and hatred with a concern for the 'poor' and the 'downtrodden,' then there will always be a 'progressive' milieu to support and defend you." Huey Newton, George Jackson, Bernadine Dohrn, Sylvia Baraldini, Rubin Carter, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rigoberta Menchu and innumerable others have all discovered this principle in the course of their criminal careers.
There is a superficial sense, of course, in which we were civil rights and peace activists—and that is certainly the way I would have described myself at the time, particularly if I were speaking to a non-left audience. It is certainly the way Mrs. Clinton and my former comrades in the left refer to themselves and their pasts in similar contexts today....."
Post #17:
“A good piece from a red diaper baby who grew up to warn us about Communists - David Horowitz (June 2011)”
CORRECTION
(June 2000)
Easy. Take I-57 to Chicago, then I-90 to Madison. But it may be faster to take I-57 to Champaign, then I-74 to Bloomington-Normal, then I-39 to Rockford, then I-90 up to Madison.
Easy. Take I-57 to Chicago, then I-90 to Madison. But it may be faster to take I-57 to Champaign, then I-74 to Bloomington-Normal, then I-39 to Rockford, then I-90 up to Madison.
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