In order to further its goals, the Right has successfully created a narrative in which “big government, unions and public employees are bankrupting the country and killing jobs.” We need to shift that narrative to: “Wall Street, multinational corporations and the super-rich are bankrupting governments and communities, shipping away jobs, foreclosing our homes, destroying the middle class and threatening our children’s future.”
Until we break this corporate stranglehold, we will have no money to solve state budget crises. Given the skads of money that corporate interests pump into politics, without a demand from the streets, politicians think that they cannot champion policies that would hurt their “friends.” In state after state, Democrats will make massive cuts to services and public employee jobs like their Republican counterparts—they just won’t demand an end to collective bargaining on top of it. And absent a strategy of escalating and dramatic actions that expose the wrongdoing of corporations and the uber-rich that got us into this mess, we are trapped in a strategy that depends on politicians to rein in the very corporations they are in thrall to.
Corporations are creating an environment that is favorable to them but harmful to most Americans. Our job is to figure out how to turn this scenario on its head, to decrease their security so we can win greater opportunity and security for the rest of us, lifting the bottom, growing the middle and holding the top in check—just as we did for most of the 20th century.
Creating massive insecurity for Wall Street, corporations and the super-rich is a precondition for fixing the economy and country. There can be no new “social contract,” no “new New Deal,” no comprehensive legislation that allows workers to organize and no limits to corporate power as long as corporate CEOs feel insulated from the suffering they cause.
At first blush this sounds a little crazy. It runs counter to the message many economists and politicians bombard us with every day in the media. Their claim is that businesses aren’t investing, jobs aren’t being created and the housing market isn’t stabilizing because the corporate community needs greater certainty and predictability. These same people would argue that Obama and the Democrats need to be more business-friendly. Yet, Corporate America already has record profits and cash on hand. In short: the best of all worlds.
They know far better than we do that their hold on power is dependent on our acquiescence to their false premises and pseudo-free market ideology. Therefore we must directly challenge them in the streets so that they have more to lose by ignoring the public interest than by accepting real change.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/720 ... e_streets/