I’m tapped out. What do you have?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
12 Comments
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I’ve noticed americanpolitics.com links to some of your diaries more and more often. It was today or yesterday that they had two linked in their Newswire.
i got nothin’.
tired, car is still broken, kid is visiting, brain kinda fried.
I was reading quotes from Republicans bitching about the GM takeover and threatening to boycott GM cars because the company is now owned by the
peopledadburned gummint and the accursedUAWcommunist fifth columnists.There are four main classes of people who are involved in any large business: the consumers, the workers, the management, and the investors. Investors may or may not be necessary for any given company, but you can’t do away with any of the other three. Sure, you can have a worker-owned company that is run by them, but that just means that the workers have to either promote managers from within or hire them from outside.
The GOP is entirely concerned with the one marginally necessary class, the investors, and with the smallest of the three absolutely necessary classes, the management. The workers and the consumers can, as far as the GOP is concerned, go fuck themselves.
I’m not going to sit here and diss managers as a class — there are good ones and there are bad ones, and I’ve worked for both extremes, sometimes at the same time. And like them or not, any large enterprise requires some people to organize affairs.
But numerically, all of the world’s managers could be crushed under the mass of all of the world’s workers currently on paid medical leave. The same applies to the consumers, which category largely overlaps the working class. And if all of the managers spontaneously combusted, we could get suitable replacements out of the working class; if the reverse happened, the remaining managers would finish their days clubbing each other over the head for the last carton of canned food that few of them would know how to cook in the first place.
I know none of this is news to anybody here, but the current flap over GM illuminated it unusually clearly for me. And by extension, illuminated the main problem that leftist parties all over the democratic world face: conveying to the 95% of the public that does most of the working and buying that the right wing is only there to protect the unfair share that the remaining 5% is receiving.
I don’t have a solution to that problem, but I thought I’d throw it out there. It may or may not be THE political problem of the left, but it’s in the top five.
that is probably the best random comment that i’ve read in my 5 years of liberal blogging.
clearly thought. well put.
I think it is more of a problem for republicans than progressives. Because of a strict adherence to theory, republicans are slowly being forced to alienate those they need to win elections. No matter how much Rush tells viewers it is NOT aimed at the GM workers, who else could it be aimed at? Or at least who gets hurt more by a boycott?
During good times it’s easy for listeners to think ‘he is not talking about me’, it’s a lot tougher when hard times come. Suddenly the war on the middle class becomes VERY apparent.
nalbar
During good times it’s easy for listeners to think ‘he is not talking about me’, it’s a lot tougher when hard times come. Suddenly the war on the middle class becomes VERY apparent.
That pretty much describes my parting of the way with Ayn Rand thirty odd years ago. As a self absorbed, twenty-something professional sophomore, I was eating up her rugged individual, making something of himself main characters. Until I came to the part in Atlas Shrugged where one of the main characters makes a cross country road trip and describes with obvious contempt the ordinary people he encounters on the way. Rand paints a ugly picture of rural folk. Ignorant and poor, living in makeshift housing, driving vehicles patched together with bailing wire. In one of those flashes that knocks you right out of your chair, I realized she was describing me and everyone I knew at the time. It was a hinge point in my life.
Great summary of the reality we live in.
Well put.
Now how do we spread it, besides my sending this perfect comment to all those I know who live in this reality like the 95% you mention.
Nothing. But I did finish my current painting tonight.
YAAA!!
Reading James Wollcott’s June 6 blog:
“…fills me with the warm glow of a hundred fireflies working in sacred harmony.”
Ah, if we could all work so together.
Hi! It’s been a while since I’ve commented at Booman. Given the upcoming speech by Netanyahu, I thought I’d flagged a couple of links to material that I’ve found interesting.