Conservatives like McCain 'talk Christ...but walk corporate'
PADUCAH, Ky. – ”Sen. Barack Obama has a record of putting communities -- not corporations -- first and helping average people get our fair share,” AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in his Labor Day message. “….Sen. John McCain plans to continue the Bush record of putting corporate profit over working families’ needs.” Bill Londrigan, Kentucky State AFL-CIO president, echoed Sweeney’s words at the annual Labor Day picnic in Paducah, an historic old Ohio River town in deep western Kentucky . “Since George Bush took the presidency, we have lost three million manufacturing jobs in this country,” said Londrigan, who is based in Frankfort , the state capital. “Poverty has increased by 25 percent. “We have 47 million Americans without health insurance, and those who have it are struggling to pay their health care bills. When Bush took office, gas was $1.50 a gallon, and we all know what it is now.” Working people, Londrigan added, can expect more of the same from McCain. Even so, 34 percent of union members and union retirees aren’t sure whom they’ll vote for in the presidential election, according to a recent AFL-CIO report. Part of it is race. “Brothers and sisters, we can't tap dance around the fact that there are a lot of folks out there…a lot of them…good union people [who]…just can’t get past this idea that there’s something wrong with voting for a black man,” AFL-CIO Vice President Richard Trumka said in a headline-grabbing speech at the Steelworkers’ 2008 convention. Hot-button social issues like abortion, guns and gay rights also sway union members. “In one election, it might be gun rights…In another it’s tax cuts or the right to life,” Steelworkers President Leo W. Gerard said in his convention speech. “But the bottom line is always the same. Distract and deceive. Divide and conquer. “Time and again, they try to fill our hearts with fear. Time and again, their strategies get some of our members voting for politicians who couldn’t give a damn about working people.” Union members who vote on social issues, not union issues, are part of what author and journalist Thomas Frank calls “the Great Backlash” against liberal politicians who support programs that benefit the working class. In other words, conservative, anti-union Republicans from Reagan to McCain have succeeded – probably beyond their craziest dreams – in getting thousands of working-class Americans to vote against their own jobs and unions. They hustle working stiffs every election, sell them out, but get their votes again and again, writes Frank in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Published in 2004, the book, a best-seller, is still timely. Every union member should read it.
Frank, who grew up in Kansas, says conservative politicians who “talk Christ…but walk corporate” ought to rile conservative Christians, many of them union members in states like Kentucky and Kansas . But a lot of them fall for the con job. McCain’s Christ talk seems to change with political circumstances. In 2000, he ran in the Republican primaries as the “moderate” and “maverick” candidate against the conservative Bush, who was supported by the Republican-friendly Religious Right.McCain called the Revs. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, two of the Religious Right’s founding fathers, “agents of intolerance.” But McCain changed his tune in 2006. Hoping to succeed Bush in the White House, he needed Bush’s backers in the Jesus-loves-me-but-He-can’t stand-you crowd. So he started mending fences with the Religious Right. He said he’d changed his mind about Falwell. McCain got to be the commencement speaker at Falwell’s Liberty University . In 2007, McCain, back in semi-“moderate-maverick” mode, told the Christian Science Monitor he was not “born again” and had not been baptized. He called himself “just a Christian” who had been going to a Baptist church in Phoenix with his family for a long time, the paper reported. But when McCain and Obama appeared at the recent “Civil Forum on the Presidency” at the Rev. Rick Warren’s Saddleback church in California, McCain, wooing the Religious Right full-bore again, told the pastor that to him faith in Jesus meant, “I’m saved and forgiven,” CNN reported. Since, McCain has chosen a God and gun-loving, born-again running mate the Religious Right likes maybe more than the ticket-topper. Anyway, Frank writes that the most bizarre feature of “the Great Backlash” is that it’s a working class movement. By falling for the Republican social issues scam, workers are doing “incalculable, historic harm to” themselves, the author adds.
Today’s conservatives are savvier than the Robber Barons of old and their Social Darwinist brethren in politics and the pulpit. They don’t invoke “the divine right of money or [demand]…that the lowly learn their place in the great chain of being,” Frank writes. They dupe workers into believing that their enemies are liberals, even though liberals support labor unions and believe that government should protect the poor and powerless against the rich and powerful.The Republicans have convinced many workers that New Deal-style government activism is bad for them and that liberals are Birkenstock-shod, vegetarian, Eastern intellectual elitists or sex- and drug-crazed Hollywood hedonists out of touch with red state, red-meat Middle America. McCain is the millionaire son of a Navy admiral. His wife is a millionaire. They’re so rich, he can’t remember how many houses they own. Yet, right on cue, he has tried to hang the “elitist” label on Obama. Never mind that the Democrat’s roots are working-class. Forget that Obama votes the union position on legislation 98 percent of the time, according to the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education. McCain’s COPE score is 16 percent.
“…Backlash leaders systematically downplay the politics of economics,” Frank writes. “The movement’s basic premise is that culture outweighs economics as a matter of public concern -- that Values Matter Most, as one backlash title has it.” He adds, “Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors, receive electricity deregulation.“Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meat packing. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.” It is also beyond imagining how the Republicans have been able to trigger “the Great Backlash.” But they have sprung, according to Frank, “a political trap so devastating to the interests of Middle America that even the most diabolical of string-pullers would have trouble dreaming it up. Here, after all, is a rebellion against ‘the establishment' that has wound up abolishing the tax on inherited estates. “Here is a movement whose response to the power structure is to make the rich even richer; whose answer to the inexorable degradation of working-class life is to lash out angrily at labor unions and liberal workplace-safety programs; whose solution to the rise of ignorance in America is to pull the rug out from under public education.” Frank fears the worst in yet to come. “…You can't help but wonder how much farther it's all going to go,” he concludes. “My guess is, quite a bit.” Kansas was once rife with reformers -- abolitionists, Populists, Socialists, labor radicals and other upsetters of establishment apple carts, the author added. Today, the Sunflower State is right-to-work territory. It is among the reddest of the red states and home to the poorest county in America , which gave Bush more than 80 percent of its vote in 2000, Frank writes. “ Kansas is ready to lead us singing into the apocalypse,” he adds. “It invites us all to join in, to lay down our lives so that others might cash out at the top; to renounce forever our middle-American prosperity in pursuit of a crimson fantasy of middle-American righteousness.” Kentucky, another red state, is crooning along with Kansas . “The great dream of conservatives ever since the thirties has been a working-class movement that for once takes their side of the issues, that votes Republican and reverses the achievements of working-class movements of the past,” Frank writes. That dream is a nightmare for the working-class.
Bookmark/Search this post with: |
Help Build Union ReviewFind out more about ads and donations on this site. US Labor News from LabourStartChange To Win WEB BLOGAFL-CIO Web BlogJoe's Union Review - The Anti-Union Blogspot
Uniongal's Blog |
