Kochs tell us why they are “speaking out”: because they like policies that take from poor and give to rich.

Charles G. Koch’s justification in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal for the millions of dollars that he and his brother David throw at ultra right-wing causes, organizations and politicians reminded me of a very old “Saturday Night Live” bit: the one in which Dan Akroyd, Bill Murray and John Belushi are short-order cooks in a restaurant that only offers cheeseburgers and fries. In the article, Koch rails against the current government deficit, but like the Saturday Night Live crew, he offers only one item on the menu: cutting government programs. 

He never considers the idea of raising taxes, particularly on the wealthy who pay significantly lower taxes now than they did in 1981 after the first Reagan tax cut, which at the time represented historically low taxes on the wealthy for an industrialized democracy.

Koch changes bogie men in the middle of his screed from cutting government entitlements to ending what he calls “crony capitalism.”  As Mother Jones has already pointed out, Koch speaks hypocritically when he criticizes politicians who bend to the will of their cronies in the private sector.  The lifeblood of the crony system is one part lobbying and one part political contributions.  The Koch Bro’s have spent more than $40 million over the past three years alone on lobbying efforts.  We also know they have contributed to a slew of political campaigns, including to elect Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.  Forget about the hatred for unions that the Koch Bro’s and their Scottie share.  Scottie’s budget plan would give the governor—that means Scottie—the right to unilaterally sell off certain government assets to private interests at whatever price he wanted to get.  Of course these assets would fit neatly into the Koch’s industrial empire.

Koch closes his Wall Street Journal piece with a plaintive plea to get government out of the economy and just allow consumers to direct resources.   What that means is unfettered capitalism with no product and worker safety regulations, minimum wages, pollution controls or regulations against predatory pricing or other business practices considered unethical.   

Koch concern is that government intervention distorts the marketplace, and the marketplace in Koch’s world is holy. 

What Koch doesn’t mention is that size and money also distort the marketplace. 

For example, a small company with a product that cuts air pollution may never have a chance because a larger company floods all the airwaves with commercials for its pollution-generating product, launches websites that look like news sites that tout its product and, in an unregulated world, sells the product under cost until all competitors have gone out of business.

The government distorts the marketplace and it’s a good thing it does so.  The government distorts when it bans predatory pricing, it distorts when it sets environmental standards, and it distorts when it provides subsidies to companies that produce or consumers who buy more environmentally friendly products.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that ended limits on contributions to political campaigns created an unregulated “marketplace of ideas” for the last election cycle.  Because there were no “market constraints,” the Koch Bro’s and their ilk were able to distort the last election by throwing tons of money into political campaigns of right-wingers and paying for right-wing think tanks to flood the news media with a multitude of bogus studies and deceptive reasoning that discouraged progressives into staying home and marched other voters rightward.

Everything distorts the marketplace.  As a matter of public policy, it’s the government’s job to distort it for the public good, which in the post-industrial Western world has come to include a basic standard of living, education and health care for all, a clean environment and a level playing field in the market and society that sometimes requires constraining the largest market participants.

Deconstruction of typical anti-union cant reveals logical inconsistencies and devious propaganda tricks.

Among the flotilla of right-wing online publications that clog up the waterways of the Internet is the American Thinker, described by Wikipedia as “a daily conservative Internet publication dealing with American politics, foreign policy, national security, economics, diplomacy, culture, military strategy, and the survival of the State of Israel.”

A recent issue featured an anti-union diatribe title “Why I Changed My Mind About Unions,” by someone named Michael Filozof.  The article serves as a textbook case for a few shabby propaganda techniques. 

The article details how Filozof, child of a union family, evolved from being a union supporter to disliking unions. 

The article unfolds using a tried-and-true rhetorical strategy: argument from the negative.  In the classic argument from the negative, you use the premises of your opponent to prove your point.   The less rigorous form Filozof follows is to start in one position and end in its opposite.  Filozof, at least rhetorically, starts as a supporter and ends as an opponent of unions because he “has seen the negative effects of unions my entire life.”  There is nothing inherently wrong or devious with the argument from the negative—that is, if the details are right.

But all Filozof provides are anecdotes:

  •  “I’d heard stories about union people who worked in the steel mill or the auto plants who would punch the clock and than find a place to sleep all day, or would get drunk at lunchtime and return to work and still not get fired…” He never offers any proof of this statement.  They are just vague rumors, so represent the worst type of arguing from anecdote, which is when you prove a point by telling a story.   Too often, though, the argument by anecdote is used when the facts are stacked heavily against a position.  If you don’t have the facts, tell a story.  People will believe the anecdote because it exemplifies what they believe to be true.  That’s why you’ll find more arguments by anecdotes proffered by those on the losing end of the “facts” battle.  In this case, the anecdote is second hand, that is, something he only heard about and did not experience.
  • A union guy on a forklift drives by him and his Dad on a shop floor, yelling, “This f…ing job suuuuucks!”  Filozof said it enraged him because he knew that the guy couldn’t be fired because he was in a union and because he knew the guy was making more money than he with his three college degrees was making.  To which I say, BFD.  It’s absurd to condemn unions because one guy expressed what may only be a momentary hatred for his job in a particularly rude manner.  Everyone blows off steam and employees in workplaces in which you can never utter a word of displeasure would probably appreciate the protection of a union.  I have worked in three office environments—newsrooms, ad agencies and corporate marketing departments—and the only way I could imagine any of these workplaces without the occasional whining and the chronic whiners is if they were filled with nothing but robots.
  • The same anecdote contains some twisted thinking.  You would think that the fact that the union enabled someone without a college diploma to earn a good living would be a positive attribute of unionism, which should make more educated workers want to unionize themselves. (In fact, they do: teachers, nurses, civil service professionals).  By depicting the earnings ability as a negative, Filozof reveals his anti-union point of view more than he proves his point.
  • Now for my favorite: Filozof’s absolute anger at learning that a union roofer who only worked about half the time got paid unemployment for the weeks in which he didn’t work.  He goes on to paint the roofer as a malingering pothead who takes money under the table to do odd jobs in the off season while collecting unemployment.  Let’s strip away these embellishments and look at the core problem he finds—collecting unemployment during weeks when you can’t work.  This option is not limited to union members, but available to anyone with occasional work, including non-unionized accountants, bookkeepers, administrative assistants and other temp workers hired through services, free-lance writers working for agencies and corporations and lawyers staffing large legal processing centers.  I imagine that few of these workers file applications with McDonalds and Wal-Mart during the weeks they don’t have assignments.  What Filozof does is blame the union member for something that is everybody’s right.   

In all the anecdotes, a union guy acts in a way that makes Filozof angry.  But note that in all case, the union guy is doing something all employees—or should I say, representatives of all types and classes of employees—do or have done. 

The other thing to note is that the anger is often because the union guy is doing better than Filozof is doing.  It’s that kind of small-minded envy that forms the basis of the anger that the right-wing and mainstream news media want to instill in others of the middle and working class when it comes to unions.  Now I can understand why representatives of those in the business ruling elite benighted enough to think that they profit in the long run by keeping wages down would want others in the working and middle classes to envy union workers. 

But why do so many people who should look to the union model for improving their own lives instead believe these specious arguments and envy the union worker?  After all, these same media regularly have features that laud the ability of celebrities and business leaders to accumulate money.  Why is it good for business owners to do well, but not for union members?  And why do others in the middle and working class believe this nonsense?

By the way, it was hard to find any information on Filozof.  AmThink says that its contributors are “accomplished in fields beyond journalism and animated to write for the general public out of concern for the complex and morally significant questions on the national agenda.” But like all the writers for AmThink, I had never heard of Filozof.

Good thing I can google Mr. Filozof.  Let’s see now…

I would say that nowadays the major standard for “accomplishment in fields” is a Wikipedia biography.  Mr. Filozof has none. 

And nowadays, writing a book is a sign of accomplishment.  Now if a book has been published and is for sale, you’ll likely be able to find it on Amazon.com.  By this measure, we can conclude that Filozof has published no books.  In fact there is no reference anywhere online to Filozof having written a book.

Piecing together his one-sentence bio on another conservative website, National Review Online, some news reports and a court filing, I was able to learn that once upon a time Filozof was an adjunct professor of political science at the State University of New York at Brockport.  But he last surfaced academically at the prestigious Monroe Community College in the Rochester, New York area, which evidently fired him after allegations that he sexually harassed both a male and a female.  Filozof has sued the community college, claiming a conspiracy to terminate his employment because he is a conservative, and, of course, the lawsuit has gotten him a wee bit of coverage as a martyr on another right-wing website called Accuracy in Academia.

That’s a very bizarre definition of “accomplished in fields beyond journalism” that AmThink is using, don’t you think?

Can the Wisconsin public union fight start a new movement to take back the country from the far right?

I wanted to pose a question that only time will answer:

Will the energy nationwide among progressives aroused by the Wisconsin public union fight grow and lead to a truly national movement that would sweep not Democrats, but progressives into office?

Will it happen?  Only if we—meaning you, me and everyone we know—make it happen. 

In the abstract that means three great demographic migrations:

  1. Working class to Democrats or small progressive parties:  The long-alienated white working class, once called “Reagan Democrats,” must realize that the right-wing anti-government nonsense they bought into actually hurts their economic interests.
  2. Young and minorities to polls: The non-voting young and minority must realize that they have to show up at the polls for every election, including all the primaries.
  3. Everyone to activists: All of us should make it clear in emails and letters to all candidates and potential candidates where we stand on the issues. 

For those elected to federal offices, here are the demands I would propose that people make of those seeking their votes or funds in the primaries:

  • Oppose anti-union measures, especially those that curtail bargaining rights or raid pensions.
  • Propose funding the minor Social Security gap by removing the cap on wages that pay the Social Security tax (called FICA).  Right now, people only pay on a maximum of $106,800 in wages.  Robert Reich recently said that if the cap were raised to $180,000, Social Security would be fully funded.    
  • Support legislation to raise the minimum wage and tighten the exemptions from it.
  • Support a multi-billion-dollar investment program in mass transit in cities and between cities; getting high-speed Internet into every household; improving our existing roads, bridges, tunnels and public parks, and developing alternative fuels and industrial processes, all with the objective of creating jobs and erecting the infrastructure for future growth.
  • Call for an immediate withdrawal from both Iraq and Afghanistan and a 40 percent reduction in military spending.
  • Support legislation to raise federal income taxes to the levels of 1979, which were historically low at the time but much higher than today, and use the funds to lower the deficit and return social services, education and healthcare programs to full funding.
  • Support gay marriage, a woman’s right to an abortion, a fair immigration policy, accurate science teaching in the schools, and greater controls on owning and carrying guns.

Let’s not let our energies dissipate.  Let’s let our oligarchy (or should I say “nobility”) of elected officials and candidates know that they have to begin doing what’s in the best interest of all Americans, not just the wealthy.