[Peace-discuss] Guess the author (no googling)

[Stuart Levy]

Yeah, saw this a couple of weeks ago.  Chomsky, right?

>> "Encouraging anti-tax sentiment has long been a staple of business propaganda."

Right.  As with Proposition 13 in CA, whose main beneficiaries were
businesses, as their property taxes were cut even more than homeowners'.

>> 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.

Note that he's not saying that the Tea Party's current direction is harmless.

On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 04:32:31PM -0500, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> 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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