Back to the root: American Spectator Declares War on Wisconsin's Workers

Words I never expected to utter: Thank you American Spectator!

The American Spectator continues to be an ardent and unrepentant enemy of working people and the mouthpiece of American fascism, but at least in their most recent issue they got the nature of the events in Wisconsin right in the title of their piece covering the Wisconsin workers' uprising: "The War in Wisconsin".

As the Spectator points out, there IS a war going on against workers, not only in Wisconsin but all across America, as the totalitarians of capitalism close in on the last element of democratic resistance to unbridled corporate power: organized labor. (Please don't say you thought that this was the role of the Democratic Party or Barack Obama; if that is your thinking you are far too innocent to be let outside without a chaperone...)

The right's plan is not new: The Pinkertons started busting unions (and the skulls of workers and their families) for the corporate trusts in the first decade of the 20th century. In the contemporary era, Ronald Regan fired the first shot with the decertfication of PATCO after goading air traffic controllers into a strike for the explicit purpose of firing them, busting their union, and beginning the battle to bring organized labor to heel.

Uncle Ron's program of fanning populist flames of hatred for organized labor was taken up by the odious Grover Norquist and "movement conservatives" in the 1990s and has since become the operational core of US rightwing politics around which every other "issue" and political agenda item actually revolves. Policywise, undoing the Constitution's democratic protections for the free association of individuals while simultaneously extending just such protections to the thoroughly fictive "persons" of corporate entities has become the holy grail of the American right.

And in the last two years, the American right has come within striking distance of their final two goals: Unlimited corporate influence over the political system by way of a fraudulent extension of civil liberties protections to corporations (see the radically activist an anti-American "Citizens United" SCOTUS ruling); the stripping of workers of any remaining civil, political, legal, or social protection form rapacious exploitation at the hands of liberated capitalists (see "National Right to Work" and Governor Walker's plan for Wisconsin's public sector workers).

While democracy burns in the hearts of the heroes of Tahrir Square and threatens to spark a prairie fire of uprisings all across the Middle East, here in the US it struggles yet for its survival, barley breathing now on life support.

CODE BLUE:

Here in America the people's tool of government is being systemically ripped from their hands by the coordinated and syndicalized power of corporate capitalism and their salaried lackeys in Congress. The intended outcome--government power and political dominance wed to the social and economic interests of sprawling corporations for the mutual and unassailable benefit of a narrow class of superwealthy superelites--has a known history, a coherent if diabolical ideology, and a pair of perfectly suitable names: fascism and nationalist-socialism. Look them up and don't be afraid to use them to name the enemy in the war that The American Spectator has so helpfully now publicly declared.

Stand up and voice your support for the heroes of Wisconsin now!