Hitting the Right's Pitch

        It was many years, centuries in fact, before the Visigoths overwhelmed Rome.  First they became insiders fighting barbarian competitors alongside Roman troops on the northern frontier. Perceiving the growing weakness in the Empire, the Visigoths gradually congealed, overwhelming, looting and destroying whole Roman cities.   

        Detroit is not Rome, but a look at it makes one ask when it was that the Nazis or some other enemy swept  in with their bombers?  Much of the city is utterly destroyed from neighborhood streets to elegant train stations . It’s the same story in many other cities.   The enemy air raids on Detroit, Youngstown, Cleveland came, of course, from a capitalism that can be called “classic” only because it went on its way unchallenged. 

     

         Is it happening now? 

         

         The Financial Times (1/14/14) headlines “A productivity crisis is stalking the global economy as most countries last year failed to improve their overall efficiency for the first time in decades.”  That’s econo-speak for too many people could not go back to work. In between the lines it means that the true goal of efficiency is to reduce labor costs, by finding a way workers will double their productivity so no one will notice the bread lines.  

Last Friday’s monthly Jobs Report from the Department of Labor (DOL) shouts the same tragic story.  There are 1.2 million fewer jobs on nonfarm payrolls and 638,000 thousand fewer jobs on private payrolls in December than when the recession began in December 2007,” While Census Bureau data says the nation grew by another 11 million people. More people, fewer and fewer jobs.

         

            Chad Stone, Chief Economist at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities(on 1/10/14):

 “The share of the population with a job, which plummeted in the recession from 62.7 percent in December 2007 to levels last seen in the mid-1980s and has remained below 60 percent since early 2009, was 58.6 percent.'

                

          The real danger now comes not from metaphorical air raids but from a Right wing take-over built on the ruins of millions of people’s empty pocketbooks and lost homes—thanks to the Great Recession—and from a revival or racial scapegoating.  

          With the Obama mystique severely damaged by the gross mishandling of its own Affordable Health Care Act,  we find at least thirteen states in play for possible Republican senate victories; this on top of thirty-six state governorships all in Republican hands now.  It’s not paranoia to imagine a worst case scenario in which the prejudices of wounded people come to be exploited and then used to dominate national attitudes amid even more tightening economic conditions.  Models for radical conservative takeovers of government are ready at hand in Wisconsin and North Carolina, ready for the copying.  

        Bill Moyer’s Report describes it this way in North Carolina:

“Now…Republicans hold the governor’s mansion and both houses of the legislature and they are steering North Carolina far to the right: slashing taxes on corporations and the wealthy, providing vouchers to private schools, cutting unemployment benefits, refusing to expand Medicaid and rolling back electoral reforms, including voting rights.'

         The American Prospect writers, Kriss Kromm and Sue Sturgis describe the new policy strategy on the Right:

“…photo ID at the polls, slash the number of early-voting days, eliminate same-day registration during early voting, and delay by five years the time it takes for former felons to regain their voting rights…. ban parents from claiming their college children as dependents on their state taxes if those children vote on campus (as most students do)….[prohibit] the “mentally incompetent” from voting. “

         William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, writes in Politico describing his version of good news in 2014:

“an Obamacare-inspired Republican wave…that will not only sweep out red-state Democrats, but will also produce a gaggle of Republicans coming to the Senate to represent states Obama carried, including New Hampshire, Iowa, Michigan … and Virginia."

        Then there is Wisconsin’s Republican governor, Scott Walker, who shows another Right wing plank: successfully pushing his campaign to deprive public workers of collective bargaining rights and increase their share of payments for pensions and health care. He’s winning against Union-driven recall efforts.

        After the Fall months of good cheer about the recovering economy the December unemployment report demonstrates the nation has been drinking too much of the cool aide stuff.  Economist Stone continues: 

“December’s job growth (even with the revisions to earlier months) was well below the sustained job growth of 200,000 to 300,000 a month that would mark a robust jobs recovery…The unemployment rate was 6.7 percent in December, and 10.4 million people were unemployed….  The unemployment rate was 5.9 percent for whites (1.5 percentage points higher than at the start of the recession), 11.9 percent for African Americans (2.9 percentage points higher than at the start of the recession), and 8.3 percent for Hispanics or Latinos (2.0 percentage points higher than at the start of the recession)."

          Faith communities have missed many a pitch over the last several hundred years: remaining silent during the era of slavery; remaining silent (mostly) during the Jim Crow period; missing the call to support anti-war movements against the slaughter of several wars.  Since the time of Caesar Chavez and the massacres of Central America they've done better, especially in advocacy for refugees.  Now they need to hit the Right wing's ball that is polarizing government and deepening the growing open wound of inequality.