Rah, Rah, Rah

Stephen Lerner has an article posted on AlterNet, We Have to Fight the Plutocrats to Build an Economy that Works, that fits into what I would call the "Rah, Rah, Rah" mentality. It aptly describes the problems we face in this country and it offers many of the general tools that we could use to counter and/or alleviate many of them, but it is very short on a specific strategy. It is preaching to the choir what almost everybody in the choir already knows!

As to the problems before us, Lerner frames them this way:

Wall Street, big banks, multinational corporations and the super-rich were able to seize the opportunity in 2008. They are now in the extraordinary position of leveraging the insecurity most Americans face to demand unending concessions, while simultaneously demanding security and certainty for their own capital and investments.

Events unfolding in statehouses in Wisconsin, Ohio and around the country demonstrate that Wall Street, giant corporations, the super-rich and the politicians they support are ruthlessly executing a plan to slash public budgets; destroy public employee unions and the livelihoods of teachers, nurses, firefighters and other civil servants; privatize public utilities, roads, schools, hospitals and prisons; permanently cut social programs and benefits; and, all the while, radically reduce their own taxes. But this is just the first step in the corporate elite’s campaign to eliminate the remaining islands of private-sector union strength and slash benefits and pay for all workers.

Corporations and the rich no longer think they need an American middle class with decent paying jobs to be profitable. Corporate profits can now be earned from a growing global consumer class, while at the same time mass unemployment and declining living standards become the new normal. The United States is important to the corporate elites as a safe haven, but they no longer see a decent living standard for the majority of Americans as important to their economic success...

He next identifies some of the immense barriers we face.

Until we break this corporate stranglehold, we will have no money to solve state budget crises. Given the scads of money that corporate interests pump into politics, without a demand from the streets, politicians think that they cannot champion policies that would hurt their “friends.” In state after state, Democrats will make massive cuts to services and public employee jobs like their Republican counterparts — they just won’t demand an end to collective bargaining on top of it. And absent a strategy of escalating and dramatic actions that expose the wrongdoing of corporations and the uber-rich that got us into this mess, we are trapped in a strategy that depends on politicians to rein in the very corporations they are in thrall to.

Corporations are creating an environment that is favorable to them but harmful to most Americans. Our job is to figure out how to turn this scenario on its head, to decrease their security so we can win greater opportunity and security for the rest of us, lifting the bottom, growing the middle and holding the top in check—just as we did for most of the 20th century...After discussing the realistic limitations of the labor and other established movements, he sums up his treatise this way.

Progressives need to offer an analysis that gives citizens the confidence to challenge the economic policy of Wall Street. At the same time, we need to provide an inspirational vision of the kind of society we are working to create. And we need to seriously plan how to achieve that vision by fighting for and winning transformative economic change that redistributes wealth and power. We can restore an arc of history that bends toward justice, equality and greater opportunity for us all, if we have the courage to challenge the most powerful and together take a step closer to the promised land. Otherwise, we may soon watch 100 years of victories disappear...

From my perspective, the whole problem with this article is that it doesn't tell us anything new. Even worse, the barriers he lists help to explain why we can't gain much of any traction. Without traction, the chances that the majority of citizens will come to understand what the major structural problems are is about nil. And without this level of understanding, the chances are remote that more than a small swath of the American public will ever take to the streets -- at least in a constructive manner.

We know what the problems are. What we have yet to figure out is what we can realistically do to alter the landscape. Lerner's article -- while certainly well meaning -- doesn't do much to nudge that process along.