Jason Read: Teachers are the new welfare queens

Friend of the blog Jason Read with an excellent rundown of opportunities to co-opt the latest right-wing resentment target. The punch line: 

[T]he experience of the working class is the basic fact of exploitation, the sense that someone somewhere is benefiting from all this work. Ideology is an inversion of this, a camera obscura in a different sense. The history of politics in the years post Reagan, and just as likely before, has been a history of different figures playing the role of “welfare queen.” In the nineties it became the illegal immigrant, crossing the border to benefit from non-existent social services. Now, as this article suggests, it is the public employee, most specifically the teacher, playing this role. 

This can only be considered a step backwards: no longer are workers pitted against imagined non-workers but against other workers. (Although I cannot really say this, not much is worse the ideological assault on illegal immigrants: a hyper-exploited labor force, often contributing to taxes and social security, portrayed as a parasite) It uses the insecurity and poverty of some workers, those without benefits and retirement accounts, to argue against any security, any protection, in a frenzied race to the bottom. Moreover, the folksy “We’re broke,” which is uttered by governors and senators to justify such cuts, is an attempt to take the everyday experience of poverty and uses it to efface the conditions of such poverty, tax cuts and benefits for the rich.

Recognizing that the fundamental kernel of all these attacks is the fact of exploitation does have its upside, however, it makes it possible to turn this anger and frustration to other targets, to the class of financial capitalists. If exploitation is at the basis of all these attacks on "welfare queens," "illegal immigrants," and, now, "teachers," then it should be possible to use that as a political opening, to begin to address exploitation that actually exists, the real divisions of wealth and poverty rather than the imagine ones. The bumper sticker I want: “Keep Working! Thousands With Trust Funds Depend On You.”

Read the whole thing.