Today, I read a column by Noam Chomsky entitled “Jobs aren’t coming back”. Fairly or unfairly, there were three items in the column that made me think of Richard Mourdock.
First, he talks about a number of occasions where companies were shutting down businesses. According to Chomsky, there were efforts afoot by the workers and communities in which the businesses were located to essentially have the workers buy them out instead of allowing them to close, but that these efforts were rebuffed by the owners of the businesses in question.
In one of the suburbs of Boston, about a year ago, something similar happened. A multinational decided to close down a profitable, functioning facility carrying out some high-tech manufacturing. Evidently, it just wasn’t profitable enough for them. The workforce and the union offered to buy it, take it over, and run it themselves. The multinational decided to close it down instead, probably for reasons of class-consciousness. I don’t think they want things like this to happen.
In terms of class-consciousness, Chomsky talks about how Alan Greenspan referred to middle class economic insecurity as a good thing, financially speaking — insecure workers don’t ask for raises, among other things. [Disclaimer: I don’t know a lot about Noam Chomsky. Observation: If we truly had a liberal media, I’d probably know a lot more about Noam Chomsky.]
So, anyway, this class resistance reminds me of Mourdock’s huffing and puffing about Chrysler, in effect demanding that secured creditors get paid less so that workers could be left with nothing. Maybe class warfare explains Mourdock’s efforts, I don’t know. But, maximizing the return for the State of Indiana as a secured creditor certainly does not seem to be a moving force inasmuch as scotching the federal government bailout would have left secured creditors with the reduced liquidation value of Chrysler. But, from Mourdock’s perspective, maybe the reduced dollar return on the secured investment would have been worthwhile so long as unions got stiffed entirely and manufacturing laborers were less secure in their jobs.
The second item mentioned by Chomsky is the threat of nuclear weapons. He doesn’t think much of the policies of the Obama administration on this, by the way. But, attempting to reduce the supply of nuclear weapons has been one of the main policy efforts of Senator Lugar. And, in pursuit of this policy, he has worked with Russians and, possibly even more damning, with Democrats. For this scrap of bipartisanship, Mourdock stands to beat Senator Lugar in today’s primary. (Stanley Weiss wrote an open letter speaking, in part, to this issue. (“The shame of it is that the challenger, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, has been allowed to turn “statesman” into a dirty word. He mocks Lugar for his work to build a bipartisan coalition to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists, stating flatly that “The time for being collegial is past — it’s time for confrontation.””)
And, finally, Chomsky notes the environmental catastrophe.
Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps towards trying to do something about it. The United States is also taking steps, mainly to accelerate the threat. It is the only major country that is not only not doing something constructive to protect the environment, it’s not even climbing on the train. In some ways, it’s pulling it backwards.
Mourdock’s position on the environment? According to his ad campaign that seems to be littering the Internet, he’s eager to get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency.
It seems more like 1952 than 2012. Lugar will likely lose because he is the last of a political breed (nearly extinct in the in the 21st century) that fails to understand that the political system the far right pays lip service to requires compromise.