---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Marx Laboratory <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 12:29 AM
Subject: Twenty-Two Reasons Why American Working People Hate the State
To: Marx Laboratory <[email protected]>
Cc: "Prof. James Petras NY" <[email protected]>
*Twenty-Two Reasons Why American Working People Hate the State*
* *
*By James Petras*
* *
*Introduction*
Why does the rightwing attack on “Big Government” increasingly
resonates with working people? Liberals claim wage and salaried workers are
acting against their “self-interest”, citing government welfare programs
like social security and unemployment payments. Progressives argue that
workers hostile to the state are ‘racists”, “fundamentalists” and/or
irrational, blinded by misplaced fears of threats to individual freedoms.
I will argue there are many sound, rational, material reasons
for working people to be in revolt against the state
*Twenty-Two Reasons Why Working People Hate the State*
1.) Most wage and salaried workers pay disportionately higher taxes than
the corporate rich and therefore, millions of Americans work in the
“underground economy” to make ends meet; thus subjecting themselves to
arrest, and prosecution by the state for trying to make a living by avoiding
onerous taxes.
2.) The state provides generous multi-year tax exemptions for corporations
thus raising the tax rate for wage and salaried workers or eliminating vital
services. The state’s inequitable tax *revenue* policies provoke
resentment,.
3.) High taxes combined with fewer and more expensive public services,
include growing costs of public higher education and higher health charges,
feed popular antagonism and frustration that they and their children are
being denied opportunities to get ahead and stay healthy.
4.) Many working people resent the fact that their tax money is being spent
by the state on endless distant wars and to finance bailouts of Wall Street
instead of investing it in reindustrializing America to create well paying
jobs or to aid unemployed or underemployed workers unable to meet mortgage
payments and facing eviction or homelessness. Most workers reject the
inequitable budget expenditures that privilege the rich and deny the working
people.
5.) Working people are appalled by the states hypocrisy and double
standards in prosecuting “welfare cheats” for taking hundreds but
overlooking corporate and banking swindlers, and Pentagon military cost
overruns of hundreds of billions. Few working people believe there is
equality before the law, implicitly rejecting its claims of legitimacy.
6.) Many working class families resent the fact that the state recruits
their sons and daughters for wars, leading to death and crippling injuries
instead of public service jobs, while the children of the rich and affluent
pursue civilian careers.
7.) The state subsidizes and upgrades public infrastructure – roads, parks
and utilities in upper end neighborhoods while ignoring the demands for
improvements of low income communities. Moreover the state locates
contaminants – incinerators, high polluting industries etc. – in close
proximity to workers housing and schools.
8.) The state holds the minimum wage below increases in the cost of living
but encourages and promotes excess profits.
9.) Law enforcement is strict in high end neighborhoods and lax in low
income communities resulting in higher rates of homicides and robberies.
10.) State imposes constraints on labor organizations struggling to secure
wages and benefits and ignores corporate intimidation and arbitrary firings
of workers. The state encourages corporate mergers and acquisitions leading
to monopolies but discourages collective action from below.
11.) State economic institutions recruit policymakers from banks and
financial houses who make decisions favoring their former employers, while
wage and salaried workers are excluded and have no representation in
economic policy positions.
12.) The state increasingly *infringes on individual freedoms* of social
activists via the Patriot Act, arbitrary arrests, and grants impunity to
police violence and punishes whistle blowers, rejecting citizen reviews with
punitive powers.
13.) The state is highly responsive to and increases funding for the
military-industrial complex, the relocation of MNC overseas and the high
income Israel lobby while cutting funding for public investment in
productive activity, applied technology and high tech job training for US
workers and salaried employees and their children.
14.) State policies have increased inequalities between the top 10% and the
bottom 50% for decades, turning the US into the industrial country with the
greatest inequalities.
15.) State policies have led to *declining living standards* as wage and
salary earners work *longer hours with less job security*,for a *greater
number of years* before receiving pensions and social security and under
greater environmental hazards.
16.)Elected state officials break most campaign promises to working people
while fulfilling promises for the upper class/corporate banking elite.
17.) State officials pay *greater attention* and are more responsive to a
few big financial contributors than to millions of voters.
18.) State officials are more responsive to payoffs from corporate lobbies
protecting corporate profits than to the health, educational and income
needs of the electorate.
19.) State-corporate links lead to deregulation, which results in
contamination of the environment leading to the bankruptcy of small
businesses and loss of many jobs, as well as the loss of recreational
areas, spoiling rest and recreation for working people.
20.)The state increases the retirement age rather than increase the social
security payments by the rich, with the result that workers in unhealthy
work environments will enjoy fewer years of retirement in good health.
21.)The state judicial system is more likely to render favorable decisions
to wealthy plaintiffs with high paid, politically connected lawyers against
workers defended by inexperienced public defenders.
22.) State tax collectors are more likely to pursue wage and salary tax
payers than upper class corporate executives employing accountants with
expert knowledge in tax loopholes and tax free shelters.
*Conclusion*
The state in its multiple activities, whether in law
enforcement, military recruitment, tax and expenditure polices,
environmental, pension and retirement legislation and administration,
systematically favors the upper class and corporate elite against wage,
salaried and small business people.
The state is permissive with the rich and repressive of the
working and salaried employees, defending the privileges of the corporations
and the impunity of the police state while infringing on the individual
freedoms of the working people.
State policies increasingly extract more from the workers in
terms of tax revenues and provide less in social payments, while lessening
tax payments from Wall Street and inflating state transfers.
Popular perceptions of a hostile and exploitative state
correspond to their everyday practical experiences; their anti-state
behavior is selective and rational; most wage and salaried workers support
social security and unemployment benefits and oppose higher taxes because
they know or intuit that they are unfair.
Liberal academics and experts who claim workers are “irrational”
are themselves practioners of highly selective criticisms – pointing to
(shrinking) state social benefits while ignoring the unjust, inequitable
tax system and the biased behavior of the judicial, law enforcement,
legislative and regulatory system.
State personnel, policy makers and enforcement officials are
attentive to and responsive and deferential to the rich and hostile and
indifferent or arrogant toward workers.
In summary the real issue is not that people are anti-state, but
that the state is anti the majority of the people. In the face of the
economic crises and prolonged imperial wars, the state becomes more brazenly
aggressive in slashing living standards in order to channel record levels of
public funds toward Wall Street speculators and the military industrial
complex.
While liberal-progressives’ remain embedded in ‘neo-keynsian’
statest ideology, outmoded in the face of a state thoroughly embedded in
corporate networks, the New Right’s “anti-statest” rhetoric resonates with
the feelings, experiences and reasoning of important sectors of wage and
salaried workers and small businesspeople.
The attempt by liberals and progressives to discredit this
popular revolt against the state, by pointing to the corporate financing and
rightwing manipulation behind the anti-statist movement is doomed to
failure, because it fails to deal with the profound injustices experienced
by working people today in their daily dealings with a state, largely
administered by liberal corporate-militarists. The absence of an
anti-statist left has opened the door for the rise of a mass based ‘New
Right’.
A ‘new left’will emerge from civil society when it recognizes
the pernicious exploitative role of the state, and is capable of dealing
with the powerful ties between liberalism-militarism-corporate “welfarism”.
The revival and expansion of the debilitated public welfare programs for
working people can only take place by dismantling the current state
apparatus, and that depends on a complete break with both corporate parties
and an agenda that ‘revolutionizes’ the way in which politics works in
America.
--
You cannot build anything on the foundations of caste. You cannot build up a
nation, you cannot build up a morality. Anything that you will build on the
foundations of caste will crack and will never be a whole.
-AMBEDKAR
http://venukm.blogspot.com
http://www.shelfari.com/kmvenuannur
http://kmvenuannur.livejournal.com
--
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