Unions 6/21/2012

Unions           WORT                         A. Beck             6/21/2012             

The year 1848 marks the founding of WI as a state and the collapse of the revolutions in Europe named by that date. The German Socialists fled, many of them finding refuge here, bringing with them the intellectual philosophy known as The Enlightenment, the basis For The Age of Reason.  For 100 years it sustained WI as the

“Athens on the prairie”.  By 1948 the USA, drunk with victory, was recruited by Churchill’s dominance over Truman into the Cold War on the side of imperialist capitalism against any expression of democratic socialist thinking. McCarthyism grew at the expense of the Enlightenment and WI inched over into its rural outlook.  When the Civil Rights Movement came along 20 years later, WI unions were crushed between the righteousness of that Cause and the wish of rural White people to retain their privileges at the expense of African-Americans. Many turned away from the Athens of the Prairie and left WI in the middle between the spirit of the 18^th Century and that of the 20^th. The ghost of The Enlightenment  continues to fade here on the prairie and the advanced unions have faded with its fortunes. Today, the spirit of the Cold War is triumphant in America and billions of dollars have taken the place of the Constitution as the model for our political life.

Commentary for June 21st

Unions           WORT                         A. Beck             6/21/2012             

The year 1848 marks the founding of WI as a state and the collapse of the revolutions in Europe named by that date. The German Socialists fled, many of them finding refuge here, bringing with them the intellectual philosophy known as The Enlightenment, the basis For The Age of Reason.  For 100 years it sustained WI as the

“Athens on the prairie”.  By 1948 the USA, drunk with victory, was recruited by Churchill’s dominance over Truman into the Cold War on the side of imperialist capitalism against any expression of democratic socialist thinking. McCarthyism grew at the expense of the Enlightenment and WI inched over into its rural outlook.  When the Civil Rights Movement came along 20 years later, WI unions were crushed between the righteousness of that Cause and the wish of rural White people to retain their privileges at the expense of African-Americans. Many turned away from the Athens of the Prairie and left WI in the middle between the spirit of the 18^th Century and that of the 20^th. The ghost of The Enlightenment  continues to fade here on the prairie and the advanced unions have faded with its fortunes. Today, the spirit of the Cold War is triumphant in America and billions of dollars have taken the place of the Constitution as the model for our political life.

Commentary for June 14th

Electing           WORT                    A. Beck                    6/14/2012

Just in case it wasn’t obvious before, the election we have just witnessed in Wisconsin should tell us all what many of us have

known for a long time: The ability of immensely rich people to buy

very persuasive advertisements without revealing who is paying is

equivalent to putting all supposedly democratic elections up for sale to the highest bidder.  In this election, Scott walker travelled

the whole of the United States in the interest of soliciting funds

from rich people with special political interests, amounting to class

war on working people, a tactic that would have been more

obvious if it had been clear who was paying to spread untraceable messages in the interests of special economic groups. The

difference from the groups that were favored by the majority of the Supreme Court, while not provable, could call up a serious lack of belief in the fairness and creditability of a Court that seem so

unilateral as to undermine credibility in the integrity of said Court. 

The selling of election rules, whether for cash or for intangible and secret  interests, must be seen as a violation of the American social

compact. If the doctrine that money is speech and has the privilege

of private conversation, even when broadcast in loud, but

unacknowledged authorship, is a visible bending of  the spirit of the rule of law, and this election makes that clear.

Beck Commentary for June 7th, 2012

As we face the future of the EU zone, it appears more clearly that the cost of survival to capitalism in EU cannot be found without its abandonment of the predatory version that has been its model since the Milton Friedman model took over the Economics profession. By contrast, the only Social Democratic country to be tested in this period was Iceland, which allowed its economically irresponsible banks to go bankrupt and used its economic muscle to nationalize them, doing better than nationalizing the debt and bailing out the bankers, as USA has done.  Socialism without the medieval tradition of Russia or China has given Scandinavia a democratic social structure without a history of brutal suppression of counter-revolutionary forces and a history of gulags. And these countries are among those with superlative scores for social contentment, with only a few of the wealthier counties joining them for what can only rival them for what we must reckon as economic success. Yet the propaganda machine of predatory capitalism has persuaded the likes of the USA electorate that those gulags are the unavoidable products of even the mildest forms of social thinking, and they also ignore the prosperity of the people who live that way, in most cases without significant mineral resources.  As we watch Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland teeter on the edge of the ash pit of predatory capitalism, with which they are threatened by the failed EU adoption of this 300-year old model of supposed automatic prosperity, it is time for us to learn what we need from Lord Keynes and FDR.