There is a new Fort Sumter in Madison, Wisconsin, and a new Civil War is underway. The first Civil War was fought over whether a "nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. ... and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Nobel economist Paul Krugman explained "What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy." Representative Gwen Moore, Democrat of Wisconsin, stated “The Koch brothers are the poster children of the effort by multinational corporate America to try to redefine the rights and values of American citizens.”
The battle is now engaged between a coterie of multi-billionaires who see themselves as a global superclass of New Aryans with no devotion to any country, and who see the common people of every nation as little more than farm animals to be exploited like slaves. And the threat to civilization worldwide should be obvious.
Much as Fort Sumter was an inevitable consequence of the conflict over slavery, so too Madison is an inevitable consequence of the modern equivalent. To this new superclass, governments are simply impediments to exploitation that must be overcome. As President Ronald Reagan repeatedly explained "government is not the solution, government is the problem" and his chief lieutenant Grover Norquist explained the goals of conservatism as "to reduce the size of government to where we can drown it in a bathtub."
And their time has come to actually do that. It's been a long time coming but was foreseen long ago by those who listened to what they said. The movie Network has a section with an eerily accurate rendition: although Warner Bros regularly kills these on YouTube so you may have to search for it under "there is no democracy".
The January/February edition of The Atlantic has an article "The New Global Elite" where the author details the situation:
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"Through my work as a business journalist, I’ve spent the better part of the past decade shadowing the new super-rich: attending the same exclusive conferences in Europe; conducting interviews over cappuccinos on Martha’s Vineyard or in Silicon Valley meeting rooms; observing high-powered dinner parties in Manhattan. Some of what I’ve learned is entirely predictable: the rich are, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously noted, different from you and me.
"What is more relevant to our times, though, is that the rich of today are also different from the rich of yesterday. Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition—and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly. Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves."
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Thus the conservative assault bubbling in Madison is not so much toward government unions as to governments themselves for which the workers are just proxies, not just in the U.S. but worldwide. The superclass have fired on the new Fort Sumter in Wisconsin but it is no more limited to Wisconsin than firing on Fort Sumter was limited to South Carolina. The new Civil War is designed to remove government restrictions on the rapacity of multi-national corporations. To remove health and safety regulation, to remove consumer protections, to remove the ability of the common people to control their own lives.
Economics professor L. Randall Wray, writing in a 2008 review of James Galbraith's book "The Predator State" summarized the book as "the 'industrial state' has been replaced by a predator state, a coalition of relentless opponents of the very idea of a 'public interest', whose purpose is to master the state structure in order to empower a high plutocracy with nothing more than vile and rapacious goals."
The New Aryans expect acquiescence from the public to their schemes because they have bought the acquiescence of the political leadership. As Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald wrote in 2009: "In fact, it's only a complete lack of fear of a meek, passive and impotent citizenry on the part of political and financial rulers -- a certainty that there will be no consequences no matter what they do -- that could have given rise to the endless corruption, deceit, lawbreaking, destruction, and outright thievery of the last eight years. A political and financial elite that perceives itself as invulnerable from threat or consequence will inevitably vest itself with more power and more riches. That's what we've had and, largely, still have."
The opening attack by the superclass on American democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, should be recognized as today's Fort Sumter. What we are seeing in Madison and other states is literally the opening salvo of a civil war to transform America into a plantation economy, where workers have no rights. The billionaires purchased Congress in the last election with their ability to control the media through professional public relations manipulation. They seem to have equally purchased the acquiesence of the White House with a eunuch Obama offering little more than feeble ministrations.
What seems totally unrealized among the population is that we are witnessing not just an assault on the American middle class, but an attack on civilization itself. The multi-billionaires commanding the multinational corporations see civilization as obsolete. Their desire is a new dark ages where wealth and power is entirely gathered into their hands and a new worldwide serfdom prevails for the common people.
We may well be witnessing the fall of civilization, the end of democracy for the common people, sold into slavery to a superclass of New Aryans. “This is a dangerous moment in America history. It is not that these folks don’t have a right to participate in politics. But they are moving democracy into the control of more wealthy corporate hands.” warns Bob Edgar, a former House Democrat who is now president of Common Cause.
Paul Krugman continued "After all, it was superwealthy players, not the general public, who pushed for financial deregulation and thereby set the stage for the economic crisis of 2008-9, a crisis whose aftermath is the main reason for the current budget crunch. And now the political right is trying to exploit that very crisis, using it to remove one of the few remaining checks on oligarchic influence. So will the attack on unions succeed? I don’t know. But anyone who cares about retaining government of the people by the people should hope that it doesn’t."
If the public does not rally to prevail in Madison and in the other venues of this new Civil War, worldwide civilization is doomed.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)