[Peace-discuss] Guess the author (no googling)
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at illinois.edu
Fri May 7 16:32:31 CDT 2010
On Feb. 18, Joe Stack, a 53-year-old computer engineer, crashed his small plane
into a building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, committing suicide,
killing one other person and injuring others.
Stack left an anti-government manifesto explaining his actions. The story begins
when he was a teenager living on a pittance in Harrisburg, Pa., near the heart
of what was once a great industrial center.
His neighbor, in her ’80s and surviving on cat food, was 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.”
He could have added that the super-rich and their political allies continue to
try to take away Social Security, too.
Stack decided that he couldn’t trust big business and would strike out on his
own, only to discover that he also 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 “there are two `interpretations’ for every law, one for the very
rich, and one for the rest of us.”
The government 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.
Stack traces these ills to 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.”
Stack’s manifesto ends with two evocative sentences: “The communist creed: from
each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist
creed: from each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.”
Poignant studies of the U.S. rustbelt reveal comparable outrage among
individuals who have been cast aside as state-corporate programs close plants
and destroy families and communities.
An acute sense of betrayal comes readily to people who believed they had
fulfilled their duty to society in a moral compact with business and government,
only to discover they had been only instruments of profit and power.
Striking similarities exist in China, the world’s second largest economy,
investigated by UCLA scholar Ching Kwan Lee.
Lee has compared working-class outrage and desperation in the discarded
industrial sectors of the U.S. and in what she calls China’s rustbelt — the
state socialist industrial center in the Northeast, now abandoned for state
capitalist development of the southeast sunbelt.
In both regions Lee found massive labor protests, but different in character. In
the rustbelt, workers express the same sense of betrayal as their U.S.
counterparts — in their case, the betrayal of the Maoist principles of
solidarity and dedication to development of the society that they thought had
been a moral compact, only to discover that whatever it was, it is now bitter fraud.
Around the country, scores of millions of workers dropped from work units “are
plagued by a profound sense of insecurity,” arousing “rage and desperation,” Lee
writes.
Lee’s work and studies of the U.S. rustbelt make clear that we should not
underestimate the depth of moral indignation that lies behind the furious, often
self-destructive bitterness about government and business power.
In the U.S., the Tea Party movement — and even more so the broader circles it
reaches — reflect the spirit of disenchantment. The Tea Party’s anti-tax
extremism is not as immediately suicidal as Joe Stack’s protest, but it is
suicidal nonetheless.
California today is a dramatic illustration. The world’s greatest public system
of higher education is being dismantled.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he’ll have to eliminate state health and welfare
programs unless the federal government forks over some $7 billion. Other
governors are joining in.
Meanwhile a newly powerful states’ rights movement is demanding that the federal
government not intrude into our affairs — a nice illustration of what Orwell
called “doublethink”: the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind while
believing both of them, practically a motto for our times.
California’s plight results in large part from anti-tax fanaticism. It’s much
the same elsewhere, even in affluent suburbs.
Encouraging anti-tax sentiment has long been a staple of business propaganda.
People must be indoctrinated to hate and fear the government, for good reasons:
Of the existing power systems, the government is the one that in principle, and
sometimes in fact, answers to the public and can constrain the depredations of
private power.
However, anti-government propaganda must be nuanced. Business of course favors a
powerful state that works for multinationals and financial institutions — and
even bails them out when they destroy the economy.
But in a brilliant exercise in doublethink, people are led to hate and fear the
deficit. That way, business’s cohorts in Washington may agree to cut benefits
and entitlements like Social Security (but not bailouts).
At the same time, people should not oppose what is largely creating the deficit
— the growing military budget and the hopelessly inefficient privatized
healthcare system.
It is easy to ridicule how Joe Stack and others like him articulate their
concerns, but it’s far more appropriate to understand what lies behind their
perceptions and actions at a time when people with real grievances are being
mobilized in ways that pose no slight danger to themselves and to others.
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