Bayonets cannot weave cloth.
~ Joseph Etter, IWW labor organizer commenting on the Massachussetts governor's decision to send in the National Guard to crush a strike by textile workers.
It has been interesting watching the conglomerate-owned media covering the revolution in Egypt. It has also been interesting hearing the Obama administration telling one of the many corrupt lackeys of U.S. foreign policy to not crush the will of the people over there, while the war against the peasantry intensifies on U.S. soil. The union busting threats made by governors of New Jersey and Wisconsin are similar to those of 100 years ago. We are stuck in a reactionary time warp.
Both Republicans and Democrats seem to be on the same side lately. Perhaps this is due to the racheting up of the campaign finance corruption enabled by the judicial activism of five ultra-right members of the Supreme Court. In order to play the candidate game, you now have to be able to raise vast sums of money AND not incur the wrath of those who can raise vast sums of money against you. All this leads to policies that will support the very top of the economic pyramid at the expense of everyone else.
It doesn't take a lot of predictive power to see that this will end badly if a radical change of course does not occur. The attack on the public workforce and unions, along with environmental and safety regulations, the continued reliance on fossil fuels, the neglect to educational and physical infrastructure...all of these things will have negative consequences, many of them dire, to everyone. The least powerful will, as always, be most negatively impacted. It won't stop there, however. Those in charge seem determined to find the limits of popular revolution in this country. At some point, the left-right divide will have to be bridged and the recognition of the common enemy must occur. The appropriation of "not gonna take it anymore" by right-wing corporate stooges will seem rather quaint compared to when the shit actually hits the fan. I hope our government follows its own advice to foreign countries when it happens here.
