The Wall Street Journal now realizes that income inequality can be a source of social problems.

No, its famously pro-proprietor commentators haven’t signed up for union cards.  Two different editorials in the August 28 opinion pages come not to praise labor organizing but to bury it, whether it’s South American schoolteachers whose policies “put unions above children” according to Mary Anastasia O’Grady in “Socialism Sinks Venezuela’s Schools,” or Sacramento screenwriters hitting up California for what an unsigned editorial dubs “Jobless Benefits for Susan Sarandon.”

What stands out is the unlikelihood of suddenly developing a tender concern for workers in fields without Sarandon-style stars to draw attention to their cause during the most contentious film industry strike in decades (followed closely by O’Grady decrying the use of schoolchildren as “a good prop for communists” while capitalists are equally happy to use a captive audience to prop up their own profits). Sarandon and actors struggling from a lack of comparable name recognition have more clout joining together. Meanwhile, loyal audiences perennially show up for Sarandon vehicles like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Thelma & Louise precisely because they get more than a movie ticket’s face value out of them.

More insidious is the Journal‘s implication that pro-strike partisans are only “now seeking to put their thumb on the bargaining scale” after the “level playing field for unions and management” put in place by the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947.  In fact, as Murray Rothbard has observed, “it was the Taft-Hartley Act” itself that was responsible for “taming as well as privileging” unions and leading them “into the cozy junior partnership with Big Business and Big Government that we know so well today.”

The Journal views subsidies for strikers as inadvertently providing “even more incentive to use artificial intelligence to replace workers” than the course of technological progress resisted by flesh-and-blood thespians.  Yet it was cybernetician Stafford Beer, in the aftermath of his efforts to build a participatory computerized economy for leftist leader Salvador Allende in Chile, who foresaw moving past “the cultural myths that all technology is dehumanizing.”

Beer asked why “we shall prefer to sit a hundred pupils uncomfortably in front of a human teacher who hopes he understands relativity … than to give the individual pupil access to videotape recordings which he can replay to his hearts content, of Albert Einstein — who could be as lucid as the day.”

Half a century after Beer noted that “a computer can be interrogated, explored, used, continuously and in different ways by a few hundred pupils at once,” devices orders of magnitude more powerful are still being misused to “condition the pupil to give the right (in quotes) answers to a set of trivial questions.” O’Grady dictates that Southern-hemisphere socialists “track students” and “administer standardized tests.” Yet as Beer hoped, “the machine could be used as a real liberator” at a truly free, and thus fair, bargaining table.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “OPINION: The raw-dealed actor/teacher show” by Joel Schlosberg, The Richmond Observer [Rockingham, North Carolina] September 5, 2023
2. “The Raw-Dealed Actor/Teacher Show” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, September 7, 2023
3. “The Raw-Dealed Actor/Teacher Show” by Joel Schlosberg, The Newton Kansan, September 8, 2023

For the second time in as many months, US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), 81, experienced an … episode … on August 30, suddenly freezing, going silent, and appearing to have broken contact with the external world while talking with reporters.

Dr. Brian Monahan, the US Capitol’s attending physician, declared McConnell “medically clear” the next day, noting that “occasional lightheadedness is not uncommon in concussion recovery.” McConnell sustained a concussion after falling in March.

But among the aging American political class, McConnell’s far from alone when it comes to recent public displays of something that most people think looks like senility. Two other names (not the only ones) that come to mind are US Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), 90, and US president Joe Biden,  80.

All this has people talking about things like age limits, term limits, and “competency tests.” Which is fine, I guess, but it seems to me that we may be better off with wandering attention spans, sudden descents into sleep, etc., than we would be with these people still at the top of their games.

“In that moment of amnesiac innocence,” Australian blogger Caitlin Johnstone writes of McConnell’s latest freeze-up, “you’d never be able to tell from looking at Mitch McConnell how many people he’s helped kill. …. All you’d see is a man. A cute, harmless, befuddled old man.”

How many people HAS McConnell helped kill? It’s hard to envision any answer which doesn’t include the word “million.”

As a member of the US Senate since 1984 and its GOP faction’s leader since 2006, he’s been one of the main political figures behind deadly US military interventions around the world. He’s openly backed, and whipped Republican support for, these wars of choice, and worked hard to defeat even half-hearted congressional attempts to rein them in.

In a world where justice meant anything, McConnell would probably be living out his golden years in a senior citizens’ complex back in Kentucky — specifically, FMC Lexington, a federal prison  for inmates requiring constant medical attention.

Barring that — or, better yet, eliminating his job entirely — perhaps we’re better of with him in Washington. If he retires, he’ll almost certainly be replaced by someone just as evil, but still possessed of relative youth and mental acuity.

Every time Mitch nods off or freezes up at a meeting, or misses a vote to get a hip replacement or botox injection, there’s at least a chance of innocent lives being spared.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

As I write this on the morning of Tuesday, August 29, forecasts predict that the storm known as Idalia will make landfall as a Category 3 Hurricane early tomorrow, about 50 miles to the west of my home outside Gainesville, Florida, then come right at me.

Any or all of those elements (when, where, how strong) could suddenly change, but two things almost certainly won’t:

First, within hours of the “all clear” signal, media and politicians will start clamoring for the President of the United States to board Air Force One and fly directly to wherever the devastation is worst and first responders are most overworked, because REASONS.

Secondly, not too long after, the President of the United States will board Air Force One and fly directly to the center of the chaos, because POLITICS.

Runways will be diverted from supply deliveries to accommodate the presidential visit.

Hangars will house Secret Service agents and press pool members instead of specialists arriving to save lives, restore power, etc.

Roadways will be commandeered for the presidential motorcade and police escort instead of cleared for ambulances and other rescue vehicles, trucks full of water and food, etc.

The president will arrive, get his picture taken with his arms around  survivors in front of their wrecked homes, shake a few other politicians’ hands, promise millions or billions in aid, then jet back to DC, after which people will finally get back to handling a bad situation.

None of that is necessary, but it  happens every time.

How much airspace was restricted,  for how long, between Los Angeles and Honolulu last week so that Joe Biden could fly in, glad-hand, mug for the cameras, and fly out? How many tons of badly needed supplies were delayed? How many cops, firefighters, and medics were distracted from helping people in need so a politician could be seen “doing something?”

I’m not a big fan of presidents in general, but I’ll be tempted to vote for the re-election of the next president who sees a large-scale disaster and resists the temptation to visit.

President Biden, after Idalia has her way with my area or some other, please just let us all know how much you care in a short television address, explain why you’re staying out of the way, then go play a round of golf or something. We’ll all be better off for your decision to handle things that way.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY