Our nation was forged out of rebellion against British tyranny. For the next 221 years we have wrestled with the tyrannical excesses of regimes around the world, and from time to time the tyranny of our own elected officials, yet it isn't the tyranny of our government we should fear, but rather the tryannical excesss of the capitalist system that has us under its heel.
Today, we find our government on its knees, not before some foreign potentate, but on its knees before big business and the capitalist system.
We spend billions of dollars to subsidize business at a time when American business ships American jobs overseas. One could argue that the shortsighted nature of the American business class has sealed our doom. Our jobs are gone. The factories that used to house them are relics of a past that no longer exists and every job lost is a paycheck not buying products and boosting our economy.
With all these lost jobs we have watched the dollars we need to rebuild our infrastructure, our schools, our psyche vanish. Instead we are trapped in a rustbelt mentality that accepts this and refuses to allow our anger to explode.
We listen to the Glenn Becks of the world, spouting their hate-filled swill that drains directly from the bile ducts of the John Birch Society and the John Locke Foundation. These seem to be people who are filled with so much hate their minds can't get around a simple concept: if the country falls, so do they.
The Lockers try to sound so knowledgeable in their Libertarian mindset, but it is an act. They really just want our great experience to fail. They don't understand, certainly they don't accept the notion of a shared responsibility. Instead they pitch their argument in language that seems to show them as smart and deserving of attention. But that argument is that those hurt by the conomy have no one to blame for their fate but themselves: It's all their fault, NOT MINE!
Think about what is under assault. Schools: Yes, why should we pay for schools for the unwashed masses when what we need is to rob the public coffer yet again to fund our charter schools and private academies. Those will train our children to live in this global world while the rest of you can live in the filth that will be left after the garbage men have all been laid off. Police: Who needs police? Who cares if the most crime ridden areas are the poor neighborhoods of our collapsing cities? We live in gated communities and if what police are left to protect them can't do the job we'll either hire private security firms to do it or move to protected enclaves for the rich overseas. Highways: Who needs them? Our factories are gone so why do we need to keep them up? Railroads: Walk. Airports: No fuel to fly anyway unless you have the money to pay for it. Doesn't sound like much of a world does it?
Our parents and grandparents could clearly see their future and they didn't let the hate-filled, selfish men of their day keep them from repairing their damaged economy; defeating the dark forces of evil that really did challenge their world;
building a better world. They certainly didn't hesitate when their country needed them to fight, and when it was over they returned home and went back to work building that better world they so desired.
We, however, have failed to keep it. Our generation has squandered the vast natural wealth of our nation, and sucked the natural resources of others into our smelters and burners. Today we face a world frightening in its hostility to our economic system. Think about this. When the terrorists flew their planes into the World Trade Center, what was it they attacked? Capitalism. Particularly a capitalist system pushing its tentacles globally. They did not fly those planes into the National Cathedral in Washington, our national homage to the spiritual; they did not fly those planes into the Golden Dome at Notre Dame University, our national homage to the games we love so much; and they did not fly those planes into the Kennedy Space Center, our national symbol of American greatness reaching for the stars. No, they realized those symbols were not the essense of America, it was trade. Our global reach and our willingness to use our military to protect trade at the expense of poor people around the world.
Benjamin Franklin is often quoted as saying that with the adoption of the Constitution, we had "A Republic, if you can keep it." Can we?
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
The End of An Era
One day in the middle years of the decade we call the Sixties, I went to work at Marion Manufacturing Company. It was a textile plant that dominated the neighborhood in which I was born and grew up. I was working for $1.25 a hour, the minimum wage of the time and was trying to earn enough money to go to college for a year. On entering the weaveroom, I and all my fellow workers were greeted by blown-up photographs, at least 10 feet tall, of the shootout at the main gate of the plant which happened one October day in 1929.
It was an attempt to convince those of us working in the Sixties that the union was bad and supporting a union would lead to violence again. It was intimidation at its worse and it achieved its objective. The employees voted down union representation yet again. In North Carolina and across the South, the late 1920s and early 1930s was a period of labor strife and when coupled with the brutally savage response strikers in the coalfields of Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia suffered when trying to organize, it successfully kept unions out of the Carolinas and much of the Deep South.
Why is this important today? I'm reminded that what we see happening in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio, and surely in other Midwestern and Northeastern states, organized labor once again finds itself backed into a corner suffering savage blows from a well-muscled opponent. Like a boxer whose eyes are swelling shut with blood flowing down his face, organized labor is at the mercy of a vicious opponent determined to stamp out forever the ability of the working man and woman to have a say in working conditions, wages, benefit packages and the like.
Of course, organized labor representation in non-public unions is at an historic low. Not since the days of the sitdown strike in the 1930s has labor been so weakened. Public employee unions make up the majority of unionized America today, and it is exactly those union members coming under attack by Republican henchmen. And henchmen is exactly what you have to call the current crop of state leaders who are attacking working men and women, and who are vilifying them. Imagine, public enemy number one isn't the Wall Street numbers runner, but is a school teacher.
Most of us have forgotten the long and often bloody trail American workers have traveled since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution. As Americans left the farm and moved into the cities for employment, they fought for safer working conditions, fairer wages, and a say in determining what those conditions and pay might be. Many workers paid a dear price for that struggle. In the case of Marion and the textile workers, six were slain on the pavement of Baldwin Avenue, a street I didn't know until I was grown was named for the plant manager in 1929. Much like we name highways for successful generals in our wars, Marion honored a successful warrior who fought against the union in a small mountain town whose only industry at the time was cotton mills.
Believe me, many more than six died fighting for the union in this country. Now we are watching as their sacrifice is ground once again into the dust and public employees in Wisconsin face the possibility that what was once a proud bastion of liberal thought and practice has turned inself into, for lack of a better example, another Arizona. A state run by men and women with limited vision.
It was an attempt to convince those of us working in the Sixties that the union was bad and supporting a union would lead to violence again. It was intimidation at its worse and it achieved its objective. The employees voted down union representation yet again. In North Carolina and across the South, the late 1920s and early 1930s was a period of labor strife and when coupled with the brutally savage response strikers in the coalfields of Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia suffered when trying to organize, it successfully kept unions out of the Carolinas and much of the Deep South.
Why is this important today? I'm reminded that what we see happening in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio, and surely in other Midwestern and Northeastern states, organized labor once again finds itself backed into a corner suffering savage blows from a well-muscled opponent. Like a boxer whose eyes are swelling shut with blood flowing down his face, organized labor is at the mercy of a vicious opponent determined to stamp out forever the ability of the working man and woman to have a say in working conditions, wages, benefit packages and the like.
Of course, organized labor representation in non-public unions is at an historic low. Not since the days of the sitdown strike in the 1930s has labor been so weakened. Public employee unions make up the majority of unionized America today, and it is exactly those union members coming under attack by Republican henchmen. And henchmen is exactly what you have to call the current crop of state leaders who are attacking working men and women, and who are vilifying them. Imagine, public enemy number one isn't the Wall Street numbers runner, but is a school teacher.
Most of us have forgotten the long and often bloody trail American workers have traveled since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution. As Americans left the farm and moved into the cities for employment, they fought for safer working conditions, fairer wages, and a say in determining what those conditions and pay might be. Many workers paid a dear price for that struggle. In the case of Marion and the textile workers, six were slain on the pavement of Baldwin Avenue, a street I didn't know until I was grown was named for the plant manager in 1929. Much like we name highways for successful generals in our wars, Marion honored a successful warrior who fought against the union in a small mountain town whose only industry at the time was cotton mills.
Believe me, many more than six died fighting for the union in this country. Now we are watching as their sacrifice is ground once again into the dust and public employees in Wisconsin face the possibility that what was once a proud bastion of liberal thought and practice has turned inself into, for lack of a better example, another Arizona. A state run by men and women with limited vision.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)