- Introduction
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- Why does the rightwing attack on "Big Government"
increasingly resonates with working people? Liberals claim wage and salaried
workers are acting against their "self-interest", citing government
welfare programs like social security and unemployment payments. Progressives
argue that workers hostile to the state are 'racists", "fundamentalists"
and/or irrational, blinded by misplaced fears of threats to individual
freedoms.
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- I will argue there are many sound, rational, material
reasons for working people to be in revolt against the state
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- Twenty-Two Reasons Why Working People Hate the State
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- 1.) Most wage and salaried workers pay disportionately
higher taxes than the corporate rich and therefore, millions of Americans
work in the "underground economy" to make ends meet; thus subjecting
themselves to arrest, and prosecution by the state for trying to make a
living by avoiding onerous taxes.
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- 2.) The state provides generous multi-year tax exemptions
for corporations thus raising the tax rate for wage and salaried workers
or eliminating vital services. The state's inequitable tax revenue policies
provoke resentment,.
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- 3.) High taxes combined with fewer and more expensive
public services, include growing costs of public higher education and higher
health charges, feed popular antagonism and frustration that they and their
children are being denied opportunities to get ahead and stay healthy.
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- 4.) Many working people resent the fact that their tax
money is being spent by the state on endless distant wars and to finance
bailouts of Wall Street instead of investing it in reindustrializing America
to create well paying jobs or to aid unemployed or underemployed workers
unable to meet mortgage payments and facing eviction or homelessness. Most
workers reject the inequitable budget expenditures that privilege the rich
and deny the working people.
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- 5.) Working people are appalled by the states hypocrisy
and double standards in prosecuting "welfare cheats" for taking
hundreds but overlooking corporate and banking swindlers, and Pentagon
military cost overruns of hundreds of billions. Few working people believe
there is equality before the law, implicitly rejecting its claims of legitimacy.
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- 6.) Many working class families resent the fact that
the state recruits their sons and daughters for wars, leading to death
and crippling injuries instead of public service jobs, while the children
of the rich and affluent pursue civilian careers.
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- 7.) The state subsidizes and upgrades public infrastructure
roads, parks and utilities in upper end neighborhoods while ignoring
the demands for improvements of low income communities. Moreover the state
locates contaminants incinerators, high polluting industries etc.
in close proximity to workers housing and schools.
- 8.) The state holds the minimum wage below increases
in the cost of living but encourages and promotes excess profits.
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- 9.) Law enforcement is strict in high end neighborhoods
and lax in low income communities resulting in higher rates of homicides
and robberies.
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- 10.) State imposes constraints on labor organizations
struggling to secure wages and benefits and ignores corporate intimidation
and arbitrary firings of workers. The state encourages corporate mergers
and acquisitions leading to monopolies but discourages collective action
from below.
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- 11.) State economic institutions recruit policymakers
from banks and financial houses who make decisions favoring their former
employers, while wage and salaried workers are excluded and have no representation
in economic policy positions.
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- 12.) The state increasingly infringes on individual freedoms
of social activists via the Patriot Act, arbitrary arrests, and grants
impunity to police violence and punishes whistle blowers, rejecting citizen
reviews with punitive powers.
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- 13.) The state is highly responsive to and increases
funding for the military-industrial complex, the relocation of MNC overseas
and the high income Israel lobby while cutting funding for public investment
in productive activity, applied technology and high tech job training for
US workers and salaried employees and their children.
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- 14.) State policies have increased inequalities between
the top 10% and the bottom 50% for decades, turning the US into the industrial
country with the greatest inequalities.
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- 15.) State policies have led to declining living standards
as wage and salary earners work longer hours with less job security,for
a greater number of years before receiving pensions and social security
and under greater environmental hazards.
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- 16.)Elected state officials break most campaign promises
to working people while fulfilling promises for the upper class/corporate
banking elite.
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- 17.) State officials pay greater attention and are more
responsive to a few big financial contributors than to millions of voters.
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- 18.) State officials are more responsive to payoffs from
corporate lobbies protecting corporate profits than to the health, educational
and income needs of the electorate.
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- 19.) State-corporate links lead to deregulation, which
results in contamination of the environment leading to the bankruptcy of
small businesses and loss of many jobs, as well as the loss of recreational
areas, spoiling rest and recreation for working people.
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- 20.)The state increases the retirement age rather than
increase the social security payments by the rich, with the result that
workers in unhealthy work environments will enjoy fewer years of retirement
in good health.
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- 21.)The state judicial system is more likely to render
favorable decisions to wealthy plaintiffs with high paid, politically connected
lawyers against workers defended by inexperienced public defenders.
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- 22.) State tax collectors are more likely to pursue wage
and salary tax payers than upper class corporate executives employing accountants
with expert knowledge in tax loopholes and tax free shelters.
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- Conclusion
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- The state in its multiple activities, whether in law
enforcement, military recruitment, tax and expenditure polices, environmental,
pension and retirement legislation and administration, systematically favors
the upper class and corporate elite against wage, salaried and small business
people.
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- The state is permissive with the rich and repressive
of the working and salaried employees, defending the privileges of the
corporations and the impunity of the police state while infringing on the
individual freedoms of the working people.
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- State policies increasingly extract more from the workers
in terms of tax revenues and provide less in social payments, while lessening
tax payments from Wall Street and inflating state transfers.
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- Popular perceptions of a hostile and exploitative state
correspond to their everyday practical experiences; their anti-state behavior
is selective and rational; most wage and salaried workers support social
security and unemployment benefits and oppose higher taxes because they
know or intuit that they are unfair.
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- Liberal academics and experts who claim workers are "irrational"
are themselves practioners of highly selective criticisms pointing
to (shrinking) state social benefits while ignoring the unjust, inequitable
tax system and the biased behavior of the judicial, law enforcement, legislative
and regulatory system.
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- State personnel, policy makers and enforcement officials
are attentive to and responsive and deferential to the rich and hostile
and indifferent or arrogant toward workers.
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- In summary the real issue is not that people are anti-state,
but that the state is anti the majority of the people. In the face of the
economic crises and prolonged imperial wars, the state becomes more brazenly
aggressive in slashing living standards in order to channel record levels
of public funds toward Wall Street speculators and the military industrial
complex.
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- While liberal-progressives' remain embedded in 'neo-keynsian'
statest ideology, outmoded in the face of a state thoroughly embedded in
corporate networks, the New Right's "anti-statest" rhetoric resonates
with the feelings, experiences and reasoning of important sectors of wage
and salaried workers and small businesspeople.
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- The attempt by liberals and progressives to discredit
this popular revolt against the state, by pointing to the corporate financing
and rightwing manipulation behind the anti-statist movement is doomed to
failure, because it fails to deal with the profound injustices experienced
by working people today in their daily dealings with a state, largely administered
by liberal corporate-militarists. The absence of an anti-statist left has
opened the door for the rise of a mass based 'New Right'.
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- A 'new left'will emerge from civil society when it recognizes
the pernicious exploitative role of the state, and is capable of dealing
with the powerful ties between liberalism-militarism-corporate "welfarism".
The revival and expansion of the debilitated public welfare programs for
working people can only take place by dismantling the current state apparatus,
and that depends on a complete break with both corporate parties and an
agenda that 'revolutionizes' the way in which politics works in America.
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- Comment
Mary Sparrowdancer
6-18-10
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- These important observations, after being read, can all
be summed up as follows: Americans are sick and tired of the Marxist Communist
State that has steadily (progressively) ruined this country and engaged
in distant wars since the early 1900s. "Progressives" are anything
but. "Liberals" are anything but. These are terms that the
Communists have used to call themselves since the early 1900s, along with
"Democrats." It is their "newspeak" term, meaning
exactly the opposite of what it describes. Communism didn't work in the
USSR, it destroyed the USSR. It's not working here, either.
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- Mary Sparrowdancer
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