[Peace-discuss] The Tea Party critique

[C. G. Estabrook]

 From <http://www.truthout.org/remembering-fascism-learning-from-past58724>:


One of the clearest and most moving articulations of the public mood that I have 
seen was written by Joseph Andrew Stack, who crashed his small plane into an 
office building in Austin, Texas, a few weeks ago, committing suicide. He left a 
manifesto explaining his actions. It was mostly ridiculed, but it deserves much 
better, I think.

Stack's manifesto traces the life history that led him to this final desperate 
act. The story begins when he was a teenage student living on a pittance in 
Harrisburg, PA, near the heart of what was once a great industrial center. His 
neighbor was a woman in her '80s, surviving on cat food, the "widowed wife of a 
retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of 
central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 
30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to 
in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because 
the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the 
government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had 
was social security to live on"; and Stack could have added that there have been 
concerted and continuing efforts by the super rich and their political allies to 
take even that away on spurious grounds. Stack decided then that he couldn't 
trust big business and would strike out on his own, only to discover that he 
couldn't trust a government that cared nothing about people like him, but only 
about the rich and privileged, or a legal system in which, in his words, "there 
are two 'interpretations' for every law, one for the very rich and one for the 
rest of us." Or a government that leaves us with "the joke we call the American 
medical system, including the drug and insurance companies [that] are murdering 
tens of thousands of people a year," with care rationed largely by wealth, not 
need. All in a social order in which "a handful of thugs and plunderers can 
commit unthinkable atrocities ... and when it's time for their gravy train to 
crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force 
of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days 
if not hours." And much more.

Stack tells us that his desperate final act was an effort to show that there are 
people willing to die for their freedom, in the hope of awakening others from 
their torpor. It wouldn't surprise me if he had in mind the premature death of 
the steel worker that taught him about the real world as a teenager. That steel 
worker didn't literally commit suicide after having been discarded to the trash 
heap, but it's far from an isolated case; we can add his and many similar cases 
to the colossal toll of the institutional crimes of state capitalism.

There are poignant studies of the indignation and rage of those who have been 
cast aside as the state-corporate programs of financialization and 
deindustrialization have closed plants and destroyed families and communities. 
They reveal the sense of acute betrayal on the part of working people who 
believed they had a fulfilled their duty to society in a moral compact with 
business and government, only to discover that they had been only instruments 
for profit and power, truisms from which they had been carefully protected by 
doctrinal institutions.


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