Monday, May 02, 2011

Who's really winning?

The Globe  had an article yesterday about the "ebbing clout" of labor, all the while business interests become increasingly more powerful. This is certainly a dangerous trend, particularly when labor was never as strong in this state (at least over the past few years) as the Globe likes to make out. While certainly labor is an interest, the only time it's really been able to flex its muscles in a 'special' kind of way is when its interests have lined up with Big Business. It's always been that way, and until We the People are working together to run things, it always will work that way.

The trend lines are certainly dangerous, but ever the more potent because business interests have become exceptionally talented in getting like-minded people to feud against themselves, instead of allowing those people to be focusing on Big Biz's creeping power base. When we have local progressive stalwarts like Charley-on-the-MTA sounding like the a Fox News liberal, then we know we've got a problem here.

Maybe the real problem here is that progressives just aren't the same kinds of people as members of the labor movement, and have no understanding for the struggles that movement has had to make to get where it is today. That much has always been obvious, but there was a lot of hope in the strategic alliances that formed between the progressive goo-goo types and labor in the 2006 and 2008 elections. Then again, maybe those alliances were only possible because there was a common enemy -- the GOP -- and now liberal interest groups are back to our usual bickering amongst each other. I hope not.

It's well past time anyone with even a single vertebrae of liberal-apologist spine take a calcium pill. This fight isn't for the weak and timid. We cannot sacrifice our friends in the labor movement because it's now suddenly convenient, and we cannot be so disrespectful and ignorant as to decide amongst our goo-goo liberal selves that, really, collective bargaining on health care rights isn't a big deal anyway, or worse, attempt to lash out at labor because they have something we don't. It's absurd and it's getting us no where -- and we don't have enough friends in this political fight for our lives as it is already.

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