WHEN DEMOCRACY FAILS...

From AlterNet:

Why Glenn Beck Is Shaking in His Boots About
a Union Leader's Plan to Go After the Banks

As the financial crisis deepens, unions are beginning to realize the economic power they have through organizing how their members spend their money. With over $6 trillion of workers’ money in retirement plans, pension funds, profit-sharing and stock plans and union reserve funds, workers have the ability to reshape the economy and political priorities of the economic elite.

Lerner's plan calls for something much less common in organized labor— threatening a strategic default on mortgages in order to force banks to negotiate better interest rates on predatory loans. Banks and big corporations do this all the time. They threaten to just walk away from a mortgage and stop paying it all together unless the banks change their rates. Morgan Stanley simply walked away from five office buildings they owned in San Francisco in 2009.

However, workers realizing that they can do this collectively could change the practices of banks—and create a new power dynamic in this country. If the banks don't refinance their loans, they are likely to go out of business, Lerner argues. This is why Corporate America is so scared of what Lerner is proposing and why Glenn Beck has dedicated two whole episodes to portray Lerner as an economic terrorist.

Big corporations and their demagogues like Glenn Beck want unions to abandon any ideas they might have about doing these type of campaigns that could really hurt banks and are willing to do anything to stop them.

More here.

The sense I get from the essay is that the right-wing may very well be planning a massive ACORN style smear campaign against this kind of union activism just to scare planners and potential participants off into the hills. You think the bullshit Republicans are pulling in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and other states is hardcore? You think getting a black USDA worker fired by misrepresenting her anti-racist statements as being somehow racist was vile and evil? You think outing a CIA agent just to punish her husband for making anti-Republican remarks was the nadir of conservative dirty tricks?

Well just wait for the response to this SEIU proposed action. It's going to be over the top, far beyond anything we've seen thus far.

Republicans, and certainly some Democrats, are absolutely right to be scared shitless on this. They, and the fabulously wealthy campaign donors and corporations they represent, have successfully taken the word "democratic" out of our democratic republic. The government no longer serves the interests of the people. Your representatives no longer represent you. Citizens no longer have a say in the affairs of the land. At least in Washington. But the corporate plutocracy that, in effect, now rules the United States has left its flank open: while safe and sound when it comes to government interference, our wealthy oligarchs have left their flank completely exposed to attack using their own weapons. That is, the plutocracy has no effective defense against massive economic attack.

It had to come to this. Labor, and the hundreds of millions of working people who the movement represents, have been totally squeezed out of all political considerations. They essentially have no seat at the table. Organizing, getting the message out, fighting right-wing propaganda with some left-wing balance, all these things are exceedingly difficult in this era when we are continually blasted with consumer-friendly, pro-corporate, narcissistic mass media messages that virtually drown out all other discourse. The only field of play left available is the one on which the corporations play, the playing field more popularly called "the economy."

They want everybody to play by their rules, on their home field? Okay, fine. Let's play ball. If we really are no longer citizens in a democratic republic, if we really are to think of ourselves only as economic entities functioning in an economy, then so be it. Let's use money to fight money. Screw the politicians. Screw supporting candidates who don't support us. Screw campaign donations that do nothing but bolster the campaigns of professional office-holders who hate you and love the plutocracy. Let's take this fight to the real enemy.

Obviously, I love this.

But, if history is any indicator, this could get really ugly really fast. When the American labor movement first reared its head over a century ago, the initial reaction, from capitalists and politicians alike, was to send in the thugs to bust heads--while not well known, the US labor history is particularly bloody and violent relative to other industrialized nations. Given that strategic usage of union money stands to really hurt key American corporations, I would not be surprised at all to find this kind of activity quickly declared illegal despite the fact that unions are private organizations using privately collected money. I mean, the Constitution doesn't matter. Really, as far as labor/capital relations go, the Constitution has never mattered. If the wealthy powers-that-be want something to happen, the government makes it happen. So if they want union leaders beaten up and thrown in jail, that's going to happen.

But maybe not. Maybe the initial smear campaign will diffuse this. On the other hand, Draconian right-wing economic policies are starting to make people desperate. And revolutions happen when people get desperate.

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