On June 6, 2012, Ezra Klein writes on his Wonkblog:
“Last night, Scott Walker successfully resisted the recall effort in Wisconsin. And so, today, pundits everywhere are mining the election results for insight into the 2012 election. Ignore them.
“But the Wisconsin recall does have implications beyond 2012. Public-sector unions are a key part of the Democratic Party’s coalition. They provide money, manpower, and votes. Which is why Henry Olson, a vice president at the American Enterprise Institute, frames Walker’s legislation as a ‘defunding of the Democratic-party shock troops.’
“Wisconsin’s new law won’t, on its own, radically change the power of public-sector unions. But Walker’s ability to withstand the recall will likely spur other governors to follow suit, and likely drain the enthusiasm of the opposition in other states. And even if it doesn’t, labor’s inability to win the recall is more evidence of their inability to reverse their own structural decline. They’re not winning on worksites, as the share of the labor force that’s unionized has been dropping for decades, and they’re not winning at the ballot box.
“If you step back, then, two things are happening simultaneously among the key interest groups in American politics. Labor is getting weaker. And corporations, in part due to Citizens United, are getting much stronger. The electoral effect of that is obvious: It favors Republicans. But the legislative effect is, perhaps, more significant: It favors corporate interests in Congress, as Democrats will have to be that much more solicitous of business demands in order to keep from being spent into oblivion.”
The evidence is undeniable: BIG MONEY in politics wins as the protagonists are able to control the message out to the media and on the ground. Given the sad fact that the general populous does not well inform itself on the issues, those with the BIGGEST war chest will virtually always be better positioned to influence voting.
As for the issue impacting unionization, I must say that while the union movement has achieve remarkable positive results in terms of bargaining for a better and easier life for labor workers through participation in the nation’s economic growth and progress, they have failed to broaden their functions, revitalize their constituency, and reverse their decline. Unfortunately, at the present time the movement is built on one-factor economics––the labor worker. The insufficiency of labor worker earnings to purchase increasingly capital-produced products and services gave rise to labor laws and labor unions designed to coerce higher and higher prices for the same or reduced labor input. With government assistance, unions have gradually converted productive enterprises in the private and public sectors into welfare institutions.
What the labor union movement needs to do is transform to a producers’ ownership union movement. They must adopt a sound strategy that conforms to the economic facts of life. If under free-market conditions, 90 percent of the products and services are produced by productive capital input (the non-human factor) embodied in productive land, structures, machines, superautomation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc.), then 90 percent of the earnings of working people must flow to them as income of their capital ownership and the remainder as wages and salaries of their labor work. If there are in reality two ways for people to participate in production and earn income, then tomorrow’s producers’ union must take cognizance of both. The question is only whether the labor union will help lead this movement or, refusing to learn, to change, and to innovate, become irrelevant.
But because this is not well understood, what we as a society have been doing is to continually shift the work burden from people labor to real productive capital while distributing the earning capacity of capital workers (via capital ownership of stock in corporations and private companies) to non-owners through jobs and welfare. Such policies are dysfunctional.
If the dysfunction continues, then given the legality that BIG MONEY can influence elections, the result will be that the gap between labor workers and capital owners will increase as the need for labor decreases and the power and leverage of productive capital increases. This will mean that the production side of the economy becoming further under-nourished and hobbled as a result.
If we do not achieve economic democracy, then plutocracy will lead to fascism—the ownership of productive capital by the rich and by their institutions.
It is imperative that leaders seeking new solutions cease the opportunity presented by the 2012 presidential election to implement effective programs for expanded ownership of productive capital, and address the problem of education on this subject.
