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"Suffer the Consequences" of the Great Disconnect

By Paul Street at Apr 27, 2006

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It's good to see people more influential than me saying something that needs to be said and which I've been saying for a while: it's the dominant U.S. institutions and powers that be --- the corporate-state media, the two U.S. Chamber of Commerce parties, the policy- and opinion-crafters of the relevant political class --- NOT the American people, that have moved to the hard right. For a couple of examples from the circle of the more influential, see: 1. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: the Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 2, 3, 17, 21, 34-43, 80, 83, 97, 13-14, 18, 30, 40, 47-53, 167, 50, 52, 85, 89-90, 94, 94, 152, 40-41, 19-20, 50, 77, 94, 152, 94. 2. Noam Chomsky's chilling (almost numbing) book Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (Metropolitan Books, April 4, 2006), pp. 1, 18, 82, 95, 214, 218, 222-223, 225-226, 227-236,244-45, and 248. In these and other sources you can find numerous annotated examples of the U.S. population's relatively progressive, damn-near social-democratic and definitely non-imperialist sentiments on various issues (on foreign policy, see especially the Chicago Council of Foreign Relations research cited and linked in my last publication listed below). The first book is by liberals and thus goes too far in exonerating theleadership of the more leftward of the two aforementioned business parties (the Democrats) from culpability in the rightward drift of policy in violation of actual --- one might (sadly) say "mere" --- U.S. public opinion. The second book does not have that problem. For a few of my efforts along somewhat similar lines, see http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=6625 http://blog.zmag.org/ee_links/mandate_my_ass_on_democratic_failure_and_racist_felony_disenfranchisement ...and above all: "Semi-Invisible American Internationalists and the Shocking Disconnect Between Policy and Opinion" (sometime in late 2004): http://blog.zmag.org/ee_links/semi_invisible_american_internationalists_and_the_shocking_disconnect_betwe I started thinking a bit more about the disconnect between (a) surprisignly decent and progressive public opinion and (b) hard-right policy in the U.S. while watching some local television coverage of an airline strike last year. The strike was about health benefits, with the offending employer (airline) asking the workers to shoulder an ever-higher portion of health costs. The reporters were out at O'Hare airport (Chicago) talking to white middle-class flyers who were being "terribly inconvenienced" (delayed) by the labor-capital conflict. Guess what? Everyone the reporters interviwed was on labor's side. They empathized with the airline workers because they were experiencing the same thing. They were also being told to take on ever more of their health and retirement costs as corporate America rolls back further and further the fading social contract. Here (below)is another example along the same lines. Looking at some recent Christain Science Monitors yesterday, I ran across an interesting item (pasted in below). Among other things, this story quotes a labor historian who cites a public opinion poll showing that most New York City residents supported the city's transport strikers when the NYC transit union went out over the employers' effort to pass health costs on to workers. Tens of thousands of affluent New Yorkers were terribly inconvenienced by the strike. But they supported it, something you would never have gleaned from the dominant media coverage. Now of course the capitalist state has jailed the transit workers' boss to punish him for too forecefully representing workers who asked for what NYC's Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) calls "too much." The MTA says workers "asked for too much" and now must "suffer the consequences," including crippling union fines ($2.5 million so far) and the jailing of its leader along with suspension of automatic dues collection. The workers, with the support of the mere citizenry, asked for "too much." And now they and we must "suffer the consequences" and see what happens who those who dare to expect "too much" from their authoritarian workplace masters. Here's the item: "N.Y.C. transit workers in limbo, but unbowed, as leader is jailed" By Alexandra Marks | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor CSM April 25, 2006 New York City transit workers' ongoing labor dispute may turn out to be the strangest in recent history or a turning point for the nation's beleaguered labor movement. Almost four months after the transit workers walked off the job for three days, crippling city traffic at the height of the holiday shopping season, they still don't have a contract. Negotiations are in limbo, and Transport Workers Union President Roger Toussaint has begun serving a 10-day jail term for contempt of court - but not before holding a defiant rally, then marching across the Brooklyn Bridge with hundreds of union activists and labor leaders flanking him in a show of solidarity. To these workers, Mr. Toussaint's jailing transforms him from an embattled union leader threatened by internal dissension to a martyr who is galvanizing unions across New York and the country to hold the line against eroding pensions and health benefits for working people. "This is a bittersweet moment," Norman Seabrook, head of the correctional guards union, told the placard-waving crowd. "It's bitter because some judge thought sending him to jail was going to stop us. It's a sweet moment because he has awakened the entire labor movement." To New York Gov. George Pataki (R) and officials of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the city's transit system, Toussaint is simply a lawbreaker responsible for disrupting the city, costing its businesses millions of dollars and inconveniencing 7 million daily subway and bus riders during one of the most frigid cold snaps of the year. To the MTA, the issue is whether transit workers asked for too much, and now must suffer the consequences. The judge who sent Toussaint to jail also fined the union $2.5 million and forbade it from automatically taking union dues out of workers' paychecks. The standoff could end Wednesday when the MTA board meets. The board has the authority to approve the contract that was negotiated to end the strike. But its spokesman has said the contract is not on the agenda. The MTA wants the contract to go now to binding arbitration, which, it says, will allow it to get an even better deal. That's because transit workers at first rejected the contract by a slim margin over a concession that required them to pay 1.5 percent of their salaries toward health benefits. That trade-off was made to save the current pension system, according to Toussaint and other TWU leaders. So in a second vote last week, workers overwhelmingly approved the deal they didn't like at first. "This has been a long, strange journey with many unexpected twists, and the final outcome is still far from clear," says Joshua Freeman, a labor historian from the City University of New York Graduate Center. Another surprising thing, says Professor Freeman, was the sympathy the bundled up walking, biking, and cab-riding New Yorkers showed for transit workers during the strike. Polls found that the majority supported the walkout, even though it inconvenienced them. "The fact that this seemed to be a general effort to defend social benefits resonated with a lot of people," says Freeman. As healthcare costs have spiraled upward, private-sector employers have increasingly cut benefits and required workers to pay more for them. Firms are also shifting from providing traditional defined pension benefits provided by the companies to 401(K) and other cash programs to which workers contribute. Many municipalities, like New York and its MTA, are now asking their unionized workers to make similar concessions. "This has become an increasingly major issue because it's difficult to protect these benefits in the private sector and the public sector without increasing contributions and co-pays, and that's an underlying issue in this fight," says Stanley Aronowitz, a sociologist at the CUNY Graduate Center. But the MTA argues that the benefits issue is a far larger societal problem that has to be dealt with by unions, whether they like it or not. "To be able to get a handle on the pension and hospitalization [costs] is vital because at the rate [they're] going in a very short period of time, it could cost $5 or $10 a ride," says MTA spokesman Tom Kelly. "This is something that needs to be addressed and we're trying to do it the best way we can without presenting a hardship to our passengers or our employees."

Comment On This Blog Post  See All Comments (8)

Person

Good

By Kissenger, Clark at Jun 12, 2007 07:04 AM
ot blya kind on

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Person

What Concerns Me the Most

By Kissenger, Clark at May 04, 2006 18:29 PM
There's just a lot more to be encouraged about than to be discouraged about in the polling data...in my opinion. I suspect but of course cannot prove that most ordinary Americans are actually decent human beings and this and other research goes along with that strange notion. So I am happier about the overall thrust of the CCFR report than you are Trilateral. But perhaps no happier and equally concerned on the whole. The really troubling question about the polling data for me is "so what?" I think the thing to be most concerned about is not so much all those ugly American reactionaries out there as the terrible deficit of institutional capacity and collective will to act in policy relevant terms on generally progressive and democratic majority U.S. sentiments. Talking to a pollster is about as passive a political action as one can undertake. As Frederick Douglass used to say, power never concedes without a struggle. Americans might still be living under British imperial rule if they'd been content to tell Gallup or Zogby that they "disapprove of King George's (or Parlaiment's) job performance" or found the Tea Act "unwise" and that "the colonies are heading in the wrong direction under the mercantilist system." So many people I meet in anti-Bush circles seem passive-agressive in basic psychology: ready to mouth off against the administration and its enablers in private, maybe even march once or twice, but unwilling to do the deep and sustained collective and public work and movement-building that democratic transformation requires.

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Person

Further

By Kissenger, Clark at May 04, 2006 13:23 PM
I did read the actual opinion poll you cited, which is where I got the information in my post. If you can recognize that, then we can presumably engage in a "serious" discussion. That said, I still think the "disconnect" is something of a fantasy, as it is less severe than you claim. I agree that in some cases, public opinion does not match up with the Bush Administration's policies. Take the answers to Question 20: they are all overwhelmingly opposed to the administration's stated policies. The same is true of Questions 4 and 5, as well as the other questions you cited. In these cases, there is disagreement (though that's different from a disconnect). If you look at some of the other questions, however, you see that public opinion is in perfect accord with the real and stated policies of the Bush Administration. According to Question 1, 50% of people think it's very important that the US maintain superior military power worldwide. Question 2 tells us that most people support the expansion of the intrusive and inept bureaucracy of Homeland Security. 58% of people think we should keep Guantanamo. According to Question 9, a plurality of people (23%+26%=49%) think that in the fight against terror, the current role of the military is just right or too little! (Apparently a sizable minority of Americans want more wars.) According to Question 12, 76% of people think that the use of nukes is just fine. In each of these cases, opinion is firmly in line with that of the Bush Administration. In each of these cases, there is no disconnect. In other cases, public opinion is in line with the stated policies of the Bush Administration, but not its actual policies. The Bushies would like you to believe that they had strong evidence that Iraq was an imminent threat (Questions 10 and 11), even though this wasn't true. They'd like you to believe that they have plans for health care and social security and education, even though they're largely ineffectual sops that provide free cash to corporations. Here the disconnect is not between public opinion and the Bush administration's rhetoric; it's between public opinion and actual policies. The trick here is that it's fairly hard for most people to figure out that No Child Left Behind isn't really doing anything, or that the health care plans are just silly. On the surface, it looks like Bush is doing what they want. So if we look at the evidence I presented in the last two paragraphs, we see that there are many, many instances in which public opinion matches up with the actions or the rhetoric of the Bush Administration. That's not a disconnect. Sure, the matchup between opinion and action isn't perfect, but I don't know that we'd expect it to be even in the best of democracies. I certainly agree that candidates have become products, with all the sleaziness and dishonesty that comes with the business and advertising world. As for the 2004 elections, though, Kerry was the product who was marketed as marginally less jingoistic, marginally less bellicose. Yet the voters weren't buying. He failed, and he failed by 3,000,000 votes. (2000 was a "statistical toss-up"; this wasn't, Diebold or no Diebold.) The voters had a pretty good idea of who Bush was, and many of them voted for him anyway. That, I think, is what should concern us--not flights of fancy about how the "real" progressivism of the silent majority is somehow being stifled. The majority is not very progressive at all.

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Person

The Trilateral Commission is Wrong

By Kissenger, Clark at May 03, 2006 19:59 PM
Trilateral to have a serious discussion, you'd have to look at the actual opinion evidence cited; you could start with the latest Chicago Council of Foreign Relations report (see my list of key findings below), which was released on the eve of the 2004 election. That report shows clearly that most Americans decisively reject so-called preemptive war (see finding # 10) and also reject unilteralism in various ways (take a look at #s 22 and 23 and others throughout). No the U.S. populace isn't a bunch of raging proletarian internationalists - far from it, but they're much better than you want to acknowledge. To cite the 2004 vote (a statistical toss up between the more jingoistic and less jingoistic of yes the dominant two corporate-imperial parties) as disproof of my thesis is to utterly miss the entire point of my analysis (and that of the three authors I led off by citing). What these authors and I are talking about is the terrible and ominous disconnect (what Chomsky is calling the "democracy deficit") between (1) dominant narrow-spectrum policy and electioneering and (2) actual U.S. opinion on ISSUES. The secret to what I think is your confusion on the 2004 race is that you don't seem to grasp that American elections are now superficial exercises in corporate advertising and thought control that leave actual public issue opinion (which is actually fairly progressive) out in the cold. This is the authoritarian essence of the American corporate-imperial/polyarchic/post-democratic electoral system. You are wrong: the American people are not generally or predominantly right wing. There are reasons for optimism when it comes to actual popular opinion. Cheer up. CCFR "Global Views" study: http://www.ccfr.org/globalviews2004/sub/usa.htm Here are the survey results, partly in my own words (and don't just take it from me, read the real document, which has a lot more questions than the ones I mention): American Population surveyed: 1,195 randomly selected non-institutional US citizens interviewed in mid-July 2004: 1. Percentage who think the following should be a very important goal of US foreign policy: protecting jobs of American workers: 78% preventing spread of nuclear weapons: 73 maintaining superior military power worldwide: 50* Help bring a democratic form of government to the others nations: 14* 2. Ranking of popular support for expansion of government spending on following programs: health care: 79% aid to education: 69 Social Security: 65* Homeland Security: 51 Intelligence gathering on other nations: 43 defense spending: 29* farm subsidies: 27* economic aid to other countries: 8% military aid to other nations: 5% 3. Percentage of Americans who think US should have long-term military bases in the following nations: s korea: 62% cuba (guantanamo): 58 germany 57 japan: 52 saudi arabia: 50 afghanistan: 47 turkey: 46 IRAQ: 42* pakistan: 39 uzbekestan: 30 4. Percentage of Americans who think the US should remove its military presence from the Middle East if that's what the majority of people there want: 59%* 5. Percentage of Americans who think the US should remove its military presence from IRAQ if that's what the majority of people there want: 72%* 6. Percentage of Americans who think has the repsonsibility to be the world's policeman: 20% 7. Percentage of Americans who think the US needs to work more closely with other countries to effectively combat terrorism: 73%* 8. Percentage of Americans who favor the following means to combat terrorism: - working through the UN to strengthen international law and make sure UN enforces int. law: 87% - help poor countries develop their economies: 67 - make a major effort to be even-handed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: 64** - use torture to extract information from terrorists: 29 9. Americans' opinion on how the US is doing in the fight against terrorism: - should put more emphasis on military: 23% - should put more emphasis on diplomatic and economic methods, less on military methods: 45%* - current balance between the first and the second is about rigfht: 26 10. Percentage of Americans who think the US has a UNILATERAL RIGHT TO GO TO WAR: - if the US has strong evidence that another country is acquiring weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that could be used against the US at some point in the future (Bush's de facto preventive war doctrine): 17%* - only if the US has strong evidence that it is in imminent danger of being attacked by the other country (the actual meaning of pre-emptive war): 53%* - only if the other country attacks first: 24% 11. Percentage of Americans who think US has the right to overthrow a government supporting terrorists who might pose a threat to the US, even without UN approval: - when the the US thinks the terrorist group might be a threat in the future even though it isn't a threat now: 11% - only with strong evidence of an immiment threat: 58%* - only with UN approval: 28% 12. Percentage of Americans who support use of nuclear weapons: - never: 22% - only in response to a nuclear attack: 57%* - in certain circumstances even if we have not suffered nuclear attack : 19% 13. Percentage of Americans who think the US should be more willing to make international relations decisions within the UN even if this means the US will sometimes have to go along with a policy that is not its first choice: 66%* 14. Percentage of Americans who favor dropping the veto power granted to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, including of course the US: 59%* 15. Percentage of Americans who favor general U.S. compliance with the decisions of the World Court, not just case-by-case (as under current US policy) compliance: 57% 16. Percentage of Americans who favor giving the World Health Organization the right to intervene in a country to response to a health crisis threatening world health, even if the country disagrees: 78% 17. Percentage of Americans who favor giving the UN a standing peacekeeping force selected, trained, and commanded by the UN: 74% 18. Percentage of Americans who favor giving the UN the right to regulate the international arms trade: 57% 19. Americans' comparative feelings of warmth towards the following international institutions on a scale of 1 to 100, with 50 signifying "neutral:" World Health Organization: 60 UN: 57 International Human Rights Groups: 57 World Court: 50 World Trade Organization: 48 World Bank: 46 International Monetary Fund: 44 Multinational Corporations: 41 20. Percentage of Americans who think the US should participate in the following international agreements/treaties: - nuclear weapons explosion test ban: 87%* - land mines ban: 80%* - International Criminal Court, with powers to try individual American military and other officials for war crimes even if their own country will not prosecute them of such crimes: 76%* - Kyoto Accord on global warming: 71%* 21. Percentage of Americans who support minimum standards in international trade agreements: - for working conditions: 93% - for environmental protections: 91% 22. Percentage who think U.S. should be the preeminent world leader in solving international problems: 8% 23. Percentage who think U.S. should share in efforts to solve international problems with other countries: 78%

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Person

Wishful thinking

By Kissenger, Clark at May 03, 2006 03:01 AM
It would be nice if this were true, but I'm not sure I see the evidence for it. Large portions of the population voted for George W. Bush--not only in 2000, but also in 2004 when everyone knew what he was. We cannot somehow sweep that under the carpet, not even if we invoke Diebold. The remaining votes largely went to Kerry, who is moderately right-wing on foreign policy. Indeed, according to the very pre-election survey you cited in your previous blog post, most Americans believe that the US should have military bases in several locations around the world. Half of them believe that the US should maintain superior military power worldwide. Most support pre-emptive war and the use of nuclear weapons. There has been a tendency to pretend that the staunch right-wing population does not really exist and does not have a grassroots movement of its own. It is not true, and (I think) it helped land us in our current situation.

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Person

The American way of Strife

By Kissenger, Clark at Apr 29, 2006 08:56 AM
Victor said: "Unfortunately, the tasks needed to evict the "American Way of Life" (which I contend is the core of the more pervasive "Capitalist Way of Life"), will be akin to excising an advanced and deeply rooted brain cancer - the very act could kill or cripple the patient (the world economic system)." The American way of life is an ideology that disguises domestic poverty, inequality and frustrated energies and talents that could thrive on the eviction of the American way of life; also, the world economic system might well thrive when its wealth is not tied into propping up the vastly overstretched US economy. Think of the constructive energies that could be released. Victo said: "This of course means that we must accept the possibility that our current lives and well-being would have to be sacrificed for the future of mankind." See the first section of my reply above. Further, what would most people be sacrificing: manufactured consumer roles over which they have little or no power, supported by global looting of resources; the fabulously wealthy would have to sacrifice the violently acquired opportunities to add another zero to their bank balances. Think of all the human energy that could be released if what we ceased to sacrifice was a humane, globally-conscious way of living. Victor said: "But it could be done relatively easily if the world summoned the courage to act." I agree. That's why you and I have to get active.

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Person

Carcinoma of the World

By Kissenger, Clark at Apr 29, 2006 04:50 AM
Unfortunately, the tasks needed to evict the "American Way of Life" (which I contend is the core of the more pervasive "Capitalist Way of Life"), will be akin to excising an advanced and deeply rooted brain cancer - the very act could kill or cripple the patient (the world economic system). This of course means that we must accept the possibility that our current lives and well-being would have to be sacrificed for the future of mankind. But it could be done relatively easily if the world summoned the courage to act.

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Person

"Suffer the Consequences" Indeed

By Kissenger, Clark at Apr 28, 2006 16:47 PM
Friends:

 

Do U.S. citizens have an obligation to the international community as a whole, including all future generations, to bring an end to the American way of life---at least in its more violent, pernicious, and earth-threatening aspects? 

 

And if, for whatever reason (say, due to the kind of reasons raised in Failed States, as well as in the "Afterword" to the same), U.S. citizens prove either unwilling or unable to carry out this survival-of-the-species-related task within a reasonable period of time, does the international community then have the right to use all necessary means to do it for them?

 

 

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