Where are the Pitchforks?

From CounterPunch:

Things were supposed to be different by 2010, and not just in the mining industry. The economic crisis had everyone convinced that banks and corporate honchos had too much power; their greed-is-good bubble had popped. Our 30-year love affair with deregulation was over. The swashbuckling executives who spent the last generation fattening corporate bottom lines—and their own bank accounts—would be put on a short leash, especially with a new Democratic administration in D.C.

Business Week spoke of “a fundamental rethink of the proper boundaries between the public and private sectors” and said “once-cherished assumptions about the superiority of the U.S. economic model are now in doubt.”

A year and a half later, it looks like nobody told Washington or Wall Street. The rich are still cruising down easy street while the rest of us are stuck in a ditch.

With millions still unemployed and millions more losing their homes, politicians are now talking about the biggest economic crisis in our lifetimes in the past tense.

More here.

The essay goes on to assert that the key to changing things for the better is revitalizing the unions, expanding their mission to include all workers, instead of simply their membership, educating the general public, and taking direct action, that is, going on strike, much more often. I'm all in favor of that, of course, but I'm not going to hold my breath. The unions have long settled into an establishment position, their leaders far more comfortable with captains of industry and donation hungry politicians than they are with regular ordinary people just trying to pay their rent and survive.

But if the unions don't take the lead on this, who will?

The excerpt above makes an extraordinarily good point. The financial crisis alone, in one fell swoop, laid waste many of the assumptions on which free market ideology is based. The harsh discipline of the unfettered market was supposed to ensure that the heavily deregulated banking and shadow banking sectors would not collapse the way they did. But that didn't happen, which obviously means that we need to go back to the drawing board. But that didn't happen, either. The now pending Congressional banking legislation notwithstanding, free market extremism, by and large, continues to be the conventional economic wisdom in both Washington and on Wall Street. They're much more interested in finding ways to preserve the now discredited economic establishment of the last four decades than they are in figuring out where to go next, now that their ideas are obvious failures.

Meanwhile, on Main Street, the wildly misguided radical conservatives known collectively as Tea Partiers angrily protest mild reform intended to keep capitalism itself from collapsing. At the same time, Obama supporters tell me to shut the fuck up. That is, in the general population, nobody, neither liberal nor conservative, appears to understand what's actually going on: corporations and the super-wealthy are successfully riding out an economic crisis that ought to be their Waterloo.

Placing our hope in the unions may very well be a non-starter, but such a notion contains an important nucleus of truth. It is increasingly clear that big institutions are too embedded in the system that has caused this mess to even consider doing anything about it. That's why our only hope is the people of the United States. But there can be no collective resistance without organization and education, which is what the unions are supposed to be doing, but aren't.

Who's going to step up to the plate and take a few swings on behalf of democracy and economic justice?

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