Let's Do The Madison

As everyone should be aware by now, Wisconsin has this month become ground zero in America's ongoing class war.  I've been looking for a report that would adequately explain what is really going on there so that I wouldn't have to do much heavy lifting on this topic, and today I found it.  The following monologue by Rachel Maddow just blew me away.  As she explains, class warfare is an important part of Governor Scott Walker's union-busting budget plan, as he seeks to please his corporate masters donors by destroying, as Paul Krugman puts it, "one of the few remaining checks on oligarchic influence".  Equally important, weakening the unions will take away a major source of Democratic Party power and funding.  Busting the unions would be a big win/win for rich Republicans, and a big kick in the groin to what's left of democracy, and the middle class, in America.  let's watch:

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The thing I find really ironic about conservative union busting is the fact that unions are what has long kept the boogeyman SOCIALISM from gaining more than a toehold in America.  Let me explain.  Capitalism may be the best economic system we have discovered, but saner folks would agree that it has flaws.  One of those flaws is a tendency toward speculation, which leads to bubbles and economic calamity. Another flaw is inequity in compensation.  That is where unions provide a vital stopgap by not only keeping their members compensated fairly, but improving conditions for workers throughout the non-union economy as well.

It is not hard to see that as union influence has waned in America, wage inequity has risen.  Where companies once provided health care for their retirees due to the influence of unions, Medicare has now become essential.  As the wage gap widens, the middle class shrinks, and the gulf between rich and poor grows larger, the need for the government to redistribute wealth becomes ever more acute.

Some folks don't see wage inequity as a serious problem.  Their utopia is a nation without unions or any form of socialistic redistribution.  The more fortunate of these folks will hole up in their gated communities if their libertarian dream should come to pass, as chaos and misery once again grips this land.  The rest of them will have to fend for scraps with the rest of us.


Update:  Whenever I think about what a libertarian conservative utopia might look like, The movie Gangs of New York always comes to mind.  If you didn't quite get my gist in that last paragraph, do check it out.