Just A Little Justice

I forgot the garlic. I can't cook without garlic so we had to saddle up the six horses and drive to the Galena Territory store and purchase some garlic along with a copy of the Telegraph Herald out of Dubuque, Iowa. Front and center an article titled The Pension Problem. It was a long article about pensions (for public workers) constituting a "significant part of a huge budget problem for states" and asking "what's the best course to follow in fixing them?" It began with the joke that was floating through Wisconsin as we turned the clocks ahead - before you go to bed, remember to turn your clocks back 50 years.

The Herald's staff writer did an okay job describing the land we live in: Democrats believe bargaining rights are a civil right, Republicans believe we are all in the same soup, let the market sort it out. For the most part that comes close enough to defining a large difference between the two parties. I'd add that it is best found in the common people vs the business/corporate owners and less in the politicians who seem to have a devil of a time speaking that clearly, any of them.

But I think it's also Economic Speak, a way of looking at things and interpreting them through the lens of economics. It has a hierarchy, a predisposition to seeing the world more generally via market-driven forces and outcomes. The writer interviewed two professors, one in economics and the other political science. Though they responded with understanding of both ends of the struggle, the questions they posed were weighted. How will states balance their budgets while The People demand that it not be on the backs of public sector employees?

Where are the other questions that should be asked? Why didn't either of these two learned men or the writer ask why we are now involved in three wars? Why didn't they include the debacle on Wall Street, the banks that faulted and took us to near ruin just recently? Where were the questions about corporate greed and what would make the Great Train Robbery look like a kids stunt? Why the anger, fear and jealousy of public workers who teach our children, plow our streets, fix our infrastructure and take care of us when we are injured and ill? Why do we continue to have often rancorous conversations over how much we put in public employees pension plans when we are embroiled in oil/resource wars far away? We are willing to pay for firefighters and police officers to protect us but seem unwilling to pay for the people who are teaching our children. Are those not equally critical jobs that lift up the Common People? Do we not want our children to do better than we did? Do we not wish for them to be better educated and better prepared for the challenges facing them? Let me wind this out to the end: do we want our streets plowed so we can go to work after a snow storm? Do we want our nursing homes and hospitals to be staffed with people who are able to make a living and pay for their own health care? Why didn't these men ask those questions, the questions The Common People ask about their lives?

At the end of the article the two professors state that the past month in Wisconsin has been "unprecedented and rather unexpected". Indeed. I wonder if economists have difficulty seeing the reality as it exists outside the framework of capitalist economic theory. We haven't had the experience of many Central American countries where The People rise up after decades of oppression by the ruling families/corporations. The People agitate and demonstrate because their land has been taken over by Big Ag or "developed" against their will, their lives are subject to more and more restrictions and they have less and less freedom with which to live. The struggle to feed families in the wake of the constant moves by the wealthy elite tramp down The People until, as my friend from India used to say, there is no more to lose and the streets are the only place to go to speak.

You say we are a far distance from that? Perhaps. Perhaps not. If you look at the structure of that energy you could well draw parallels. Certainly Citizens United has shown us the audacity and power of decisions made without the consent of the governed. We don't need fourteen ruling families of Central American infamy necessarily. Perhaps we have stand-ins for those wealthy patriarchs and their progeny. Perhaps our pyramid with the small number of obscenely rich at the top and the vast base composed of the poor and near-poor just has different names, ones that sound like banks or corporations. There isn't really a difference in the lives lived in the base. Whether it's familial autocracy or political autocracy it's all the same and the effects on The People are the same. Life is political, small 'p'.

While economists have conversations on whether it's more or less about the market, The People are holding quite different conversations. These will be the ones that will inevitably shape the next many months in our country. We The People want some answers from the men in the shadows. We The People may be heading in the direction of wanting more than that - we may want, like our brothers and sisters in the world, a little justice.

Power To The People!