OK, so we know how THIS ends, but...
The only thing we seem to know for sure is that The King's Speech will win best picture tonight. Rarely do we have so many varied things happening without any sense of how they will end.
The attacks on labor unions in the midwest: I can't see a way out for either side. Walker and Kasich appear to have gone "all in" and for the unions, this is life or death. How do we see a way out of this? Especially in Wisconsin, where Walker and the GOP have taken some bad faith moves that will make it hard for the Democrats to trust them on any compromises.
In the middle east, I think Qaddafi-Ghadafi-Kahtoffee-Whatever is obviously toast. But there is no clear roadmap or precedent for what comes next in any of the North African countries. And what happens when these protests spread? I'm optimistic that what comes next will be - at least in the long term - better than what came before, but who knows?
Take Ireland, the thrashing of Fianna Fail... heh heh "Fail"... at the polls is something I think we've all been waiting for. The IMF and the "Global North" have been running around the developing world for years forcing these austerity measures of countries in economic difficulty. Most of these countries have poor levels of political efficacy, a fancy way of saying they have little democracy. As they try and force austerity on the Irish, the Irish are saying "Feck no, ya bastard!" There is talk of the Irish leaving the Euro, which would set off another round of economic instability which will further impede the economic recovery globally (as if gas prices weren't doing that already).
The same austerity fetishists - who Frank Rich correctly pegs as being guys who really only care about transferring wealth upwards - are at work in Washington. Using the rubes and bumpkins of the Tea Party as their sock puppets, they are working to strip even the most basic social safety nets and human and physical infrastructure from the budget. There are rumors of a deal to put off a shutdown, but who knows? Can Boehner control the teatards?
Oh, and no NFL? Because the billionaire owners want 60% of the revenue? For doing what exactly? While I'm sure it's possible Jerry Jones will get brain damage from anesthesia on his next round of plastic surgery, it is almost a certainty that NFL players will see their lives shortened for playing the game. Nobody pays to see the owners.
At some point, the plutocrats of the West are going to overreach, just as the autocrats of North Africa did. What brought down Mubarak and what will bring down Getoffme was an economic crisis brought about by steeply rising food prices. Amartya Sen wrote that democracies don't experience famines. Well, let's hope that's true in the era of global climate change. But my point is that when people see, very tangibly, their standard of living fall apart, they will reach for radical solutions. Conservatives embraced the Tea Party - who are crazy - and who don't appear to actually care about the current economic crisis, preferring instead to grind their ideological axes. But 2010 shows just how quickly a democratic process can turn on a party that doesn't do something about an economic crisis.
The Berlin Wall came down, because East Germans couldn't see any hope for their economic future. The Chinese regime survived Tiananmen because they gave the urban elites prosperity. We shall see if they survive the anger of the poor peasants, but they met a challenge with prosperity, not democracy.
If the middle classes of the United States and other western countries see their declining standards of living as being the product of plutocratic rule, I have hope that we can change the disintegration of our public sphere.
But I can't see the endgame.
No comments:
Post a Comment