House of Paine

woodstockery:still offensive after all these years

 
 yes its an old weeze here by now
how  the woody fraction
         of the boomer legion 
now the very heart and soul
of the jack ass party 
  can still produce  overwhelmingly
                      noxious 
        effects on white wageery types............


but here's a nice take 


ohio not kansas is where its really at 



==================================================


 just read a pretty straight up
analysis of why large enough chunks
 of ohio's white wagery
backed the prez in 04 
despite  4 years worth
of his policies 
  raining economic hellfire  down apon em....

seems  last prez election

  the  superior un hung up 
                    woodstock twitttering
                    kerry tree
               couldn't defend
          the   donkey pinyata 
            from a  evangelical clubbing
     
            couldn't hide their 
                 myriad anti christ 
"   liberation views "

                       ie
                   once 
           beaten hard enough
            out comes the inevtiable 
  
                                 wedded  gays 
                                 
                                  advanced  degrees
                                        
                                      bottles of 
                                           fancy pants  chardonnay 

   just the type of nickel plated elitist  shit 
      really sure to  work magic
                           on  dirty blue collars 

    turns  
      greasy  fucked over wagery 
         into revenge thirsty 
                      snow white  orks of the cross 


here's the meat of this guys  story 

----------------------------------------
What Was the Matter with Ohio?: 
Unions and Evangelicals
in the Rust Belt

by James Straub

Monthly Review January 2006 Volume 57, Number 8
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0106straub.htm

It was a fittingly ironic end
 to an election full of grotesque twists: 
When George W. Bush was narrowly
reelected president of the United States"


" it was the electoral votes 
of the state he had harmed most 
that gave him the final nudge 
across the finish line"


" Ohio went for the second election in a row
 to the Republican clown prince"

."'In twenty-one years of organizing, I've never seen
anything like this,' former trucker's union organizer
Phil Burress told the New York Times shortly after the
election. 'It's a forest fire with a 100 mile-per-hour
wind behind it.' Burress was speaking not of the
efforts of unions and community organizations to
register and turn out hundreds of thousands of new
voters to the polls in Ohio to vote against Bush, but
of his crusade to mobilize even larger numbers to pass
a state constitution amendment prohibiting gay
marriage"


--------fact 20% of the total ohio vote 
           was evangelicals for bush --------------







"By any pundit's math,
 the grim truth of the 2004
election was that Bush
 was threatening Kerry in many
more 'blue' states 
than was true for Kerry threats in
the 'red' states."

" The states in the entire northern
Midwest rust belt-Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan,
and Ohio,"

" a list that sounds like a roll call of states
that benefited most from Franklin D. Roosevelt's New
Deal"

"all stood within a percentage point of being swept
by Republicans"





key passage


"The economic catastrophes
 of the 1980s also laid waste 
to the seeds of a new labor left
 as it laid waste 
   to Ohio's cities and industrial areas"


 
"Ohio's cities, manufacturing industries, and unions
have been on life support ever since"

" The old interlocking forms
 of New Deal social democracy:
urban machine/social safety net/unionized 
                            mass-production industry
are on a terminal slide to extinction"

" Wal-Mart has replaced the steel companies
 as the state's largest employer; 
the sprawling exurbs 
of Columbus and Cincinnati
 have replaced Cleveland 
as its fastest growing areas; 
and ..."

here comes this guys finishing
                         right cross 


"the Assemblies of God and Church of the Nazarene 
are
the new Steelworkers and Autoworkers"

even if

" the  complete reality is more complex"


by this he leads 
   into
chatter about 
the big money 
 behind these formerly shoe string outfits 

.big money able 
to  fund full time

"fundementalist cadre ..."

and 
 
" provide the kind of material
social programs the New Deal once stood for"


call this the Hamas  uber fatah effect 


"What separates these evangelical social programs 
 is that they implicitly 
      and explicitly harness
loyalties to the Republican Party"


THE VERY PARTY

 "Which seeks to
destroy the hard-won 
public sector 
that is supposed to
provide such safety nets in the first place"

           -------- faith based gub-stitution ----------

" Of course,
here the Republicans are well-aided by the Democratic
Party, which no longer even pretends to legislate for
such material gains"


" With the pro-business 

Democratic Leadership Council

 firmly in control of the party
anything that smacks of old New Deal social spending
 is
jettisoned 
for vain appeals 
to the copious cash 
 of the entertainment, finance, and
                           information industries"



CAN THERE BE A LEFT EVANGE  MOVEMENT  ????

  NOPE

CAUSE  AS 

" radical
former fundamentalist Roxeanne Dunbar-Ortiz"
SEZ


 THE PRESENT EVA  MOVEMENT 
  WAS BY BREEDING  A REACTIONARY CENTAUR 

" a mixture of Protestant fundamentalism
 and Cold-War anticommunism"

  "later energized to mass
                 political action 
              by the women's and gay movements."



INSIDER ORTIZ:

" One thing I know 
about today's
 Protestant Christian fundamentalism
from having been one
   it cannot be
         sublated
            by ‘spirituality.'..."


"The system rests on
quite simple assumptions:

 you have heard the word 
of
god personally calling you
 
you have been ‘born again'
or ‘saved'

 
you recognize that Jesus 
is the true son of god 
who died for your sins

 the Bible is literally 
the truth, the word of god "


and again like Hamas 
its a complex bag of tricks 

mixing 


"traditionalist protection 
of the symbolic
cultural status 
of straightness
 whiteness 
and
maleness 
 with both 
genuine religious conviction
           and 
genuine religious-based social programs"


----------------------------------

 clever mike davis involked :

"In his analysis of Kerry's ominous drubbing 
in rust-belt West Virginia
 Mike Davis points out that local
Democrats still won 
the governorship and two
congressional seats 
in that state by equally large
margins, partially because 
they pandered to social
conservatism, but also because 

they crusaded vocally
for government action 
to reduce unemployment
 and create
high-wage jobs 

while the national Democratic Party
 did
the opposite
 in supporting 

the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

 and 

the World Trade Organization (WTO)"


loser klass  solidarity 

"visceral blue-collar contempt
for the urban knowledge-industry elites
is, after all,
grounded in a real historic defeat,
 in actual  humiliation."

" Male  white workers 
 without college
education, have suffered dramatic erosion
 of their
wage-earning power and cultural status"

". With union
halls shut down 
is it surprising 
 many poor white people
 search for answers 
in their churches 
or from demagogues 
on the radio. 
Or
 that they equate 
the decay of employment security
 with 
the decay of family values"


"This world of blue-collar religious conservatism 
is a mixture of real and perceived benefits
  akin to
the concept of white-skin privilege "


"PASSION AND PATRONAGE"


creating 

"an inextricable Gordian knot 
          of political power"



"This is the majority
   of voting America 
that will not
be swayed from the Republican 
                         far right 
                 merely by a different
                             'framing' of issues"



"If the answer is not as simple
 as a different 'messaging'
 or more blog-organizing,
 it is also not just another teach-in 
or protest in another college town 
    or chic progressive ghetto"

                 nice eh!!!!! 


"If the political
loyalties of ordinary Ohioans 
 are to be flung against
the power structure 
in a progressive movement  
it would
likely only happen 
the only way it ever has happened 
          in
the state's history
by 
a reinvigorated labor movement
at the grassroots"



" In places like Ohio,
 the only feasible short-term
economic gains 
for most people 
lie in unionizing 
the state's remaining industries
 (those that physically
cannot leave
 and are unlikely to shut down)
just as the
only feasible long-term prospects 
for a revitalized
left in the exurbs and church turf 
is in the workplaces
that still bind people together"

" a post-labor left wonder
legitimately
 if it is even conceivable anymore
 that worker organizations
 could bring progressive values
back into the hearts and homes
 of rust-belt evangelical
communities"

" Certainly, fighting for a voice at work
does not automatically imply
 an organizational
challenge to broadly felt anxieties
 about abortion or
homophobia"


but here's


A HISTORY LESSON:

" the lasting effect of a mass fight for
unionization can be seen in Akron and Toledo,
 the two Ohio cities
 that experienced virtual insurrections
against established authority in 1934"

" While much of the rest of Ohio
 has tilted rightward with the times,
those cities have remained 
overwhelmingly progressive
and Democratic"

 Indeed, Akron before 34 was
 
'almost 100% native-born white
city...with one of the highest 
percentage of veterans'
organizations in the country,
'4 was notorious for being
a conservative Republican town "


'After cataclysmic sit-down strikes 
against the rubber-factory
tyrants, however, the city gained 
a broad swath of institutional progressive
 blue-collar organization"
.
"Compare this to Cincinnati,
 where some unionization
occurred in the 1930s 
but certainly no transformative
social struggle,
 and most working-class white people
today vote Republican"

 
by

James Straub

 a writer and union organizer in Las
                                        Vegas.

Notes


. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, 'Being a Protestant
Fundamentalist,'
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/dunbarortiz110805.ht
ml.

 Mike Davis, unpublished manuscript, undated.