IN THE BEGINNING
Since the Reagan era and the eight years of George W. Bush, liberal thinkers have assumed that the goal of conservative forces has been to finally end the New Deal programs of FDR – Social Security, the regulation of corporations and big business, the influence of unions on safety and compensation rights, and denying the long-sought promise of health care assistance for all Americans – to name a few.
Events during these Obama years reveal something far more aggressive and damaging to the essentially liberal nation we have known through the second half of the 20th century – America’s century. Capitalism, now the world’s ‘ism’, at its best elsewhere and at it’s worst here in the past ten years, has revealed that the desire and effort of American Big Business has been a return to the end of the 19th century when it ruled every aspect of American life; when education of our children was a hit or miss proposition; when there were only two classes in America – those who had fabulous wealth, power, control and the promise of more and those with very little promise but lots of hard work just to make ends meet.
The Robber Barons, as the Fords, Rockefellers, Carnegies and Harrimans were called, ruled the Industrial Revolution turning what had been an agricultural and craft society to big industry using mass production techniques unknown to the world at that time. The railroads opened the country to commerce as highways would continue to do after WWII; big steel, coal mining, automobiles, clothing manufacturing were all possible on a scale far beyond earlier imagination. Because labor was cheap, plentiful and passive, those mass production techniques took maximum advantage with little regard for the human condition. Profits and growth soared.
When that societal control was broken by unregulated financial speculation that plunged America into its Great Depression, Roosevelt and his liberal advisors, had their opportunity to get Americans working again while doing what was necessary to break the total control of Big Business. New laws flowed from Congress – the end of child labor, fair labor practices, the first steps towards a concern about working conditions, social security, strict regulation of financial institutions and other big industries, the development and influence of labor unions and on and on. This was the New Deal in full flower.
Clearly assisted by the advent and challenges of World War II, the full weight of America’s industrial potential was finally freed of Big Business control in the name of wartime national interest, eventually making America the most powerful and powerfully productive nation in world history.
After the war, industry returned to postwar production, but this time with major differences: the influence of unions releasing the sheer productive power of America. There were the laws that made it possible for veterans to attend college, the growth of our system of public education, highway development, the use of new technology to build affordable housing extending the width and breadth of our cities into what became known as suburbs. These and many other changes all combined to develop a new group of Americans -neither rich nor poor – what became known as the middle class.
These were the Americans with good jobs and decent standards of living in a growing economy who could now afford to buy a house in a subdivision, to buy a car, to take vacations, to send their children to college, to shop in the new ‘supermarkets’ and shopping malls: to make capitalism work best – produce and purchase, purchase and produce.
This was an America which could produce enough manufactured goods to make “Made in America” the label to be found in all the countries of the world who could afford to buy them. This was an America strong enough to build and expand markets abroad by lending money to countries so that their populations could buy American goods as well.
When FDR died, his successor, Harry Truman, continued the policies and principles of the New Deal with his Fair Deal and when he ran for election in 1948 those policies made it possible for him to beat back the Republican forces who were talking about ‘turning the clock back’. America would have no such turning back – not then, at least.
BIG BUSINESS IS BACK
There’s an old saying that you never want to work with or be led by people who don’t know what they don’t know.
As we’ve watched America’s system of public education fail, we are reminded that the singular purpose of public education when it was first developed in the early years of the 20th Century, was to educate the population so it was able to build a society of citizens capable of governing.
In a number of other places on this website, you will find our views on what has happened to our education system. We’ve said that the system – an institution like so many of our institutions – has outlived itself because the people who work in it are more concerned about their own welfare than the welfare of those they are meant to serve – to paraphrase the economist Thorstein Veblen as we have before.
In the past thirty-five years or so we have failed to educate a population which can govern itself in a reasonable way and so we have fallen back – no longer the world’s leading producer but a debtor nation beholden to nations like China, India and Brazil which treat us now as we treated other debtor nations in mid-20th century.
As revealed by other great powers in history who outlived their reigning power, we have failed first to educate our people. We can no longer graduate half of our young people from high school. We can’t teach them simple addition or subtraction nor can we now stop a growing failure rate in our colleges and universities. We don’t teach civics or history, science or foreign languages. Many forty and thirty year olds don’t read much and can’t write. We teach test prep.
No wonder half of the population doesn’t vote in our national elections – and it’s worse in local and school board elections. It’s because they really don’t understand the issues and so they don’t seem to care about them. They get the personal and political views of radio and TV ‘commentators’ and consider them facts. We simply do not know what we do not know.
We don’t understand how “Wall Street” can be bailed out of a financial situation loaded with fraud and deceit – and prosper so quickly again. Though we complain that none of “those crooked guys” and their friends in the real estate business will ever go to jail or even lose their jobs, nothing happens and Wall Street profits all over again.
Yet we are puzzled to learn that those Wall Street guys are angry with the Administration which saved our financial system – and many of those “top guns” working in it – but was honest enough to blame their fraudulently warped business practices as being responsible for the collapse of our economy, the loss of millions of homes and tens of millions of jobs.
What we don’t understand is that Wall Street will never believe they did anything wrong; that all they were doing was business. Oh yes, Madoff-like Ponzi schemes are bad, the way insider trading was bad some years ago. But what was bad about what they did? Selling worthless mortgages being bought and resold from bank to bank, then watching those worthless pieces of paper divided into sales packages called derivatives designed by math and physics wizards working in small boutique shops and sold by traders to those who wanted to make money on their investments? After all, Wall Street did the same thing in the 1920’s during those ‘bubble days’ too. What’s wrong with any of this? Why is Obama blaming them? It was just business.
And Wall Street prospers even as we celebrate the anemic growth of new jobs…millions short of what we need; even as we celebrate the minute lowering of unemployment figures – which are little more than pure examples of statistical manipulation.
As this is being written, America is facing an almost daily increase in the price of fuel-at-the-pump. Yes, we are involved in another war in the Middle East; yes, there is great unrest in that part of the world as a movement to be free of dictators tries to gain a foothold against armies which will kill them; and yes, this kind of uncertainty makes Wall Street types nervous and should be limiting the free flow of oil which would normally be responsible for the rising retail price of gas.
But it turns out that there is plenty of oil in the pipeline and the reason for the wildly increasing costs are all about Wall Street speculators who are dealing in “futures” with barrels of oil as their product of choice. We’re paying so much more at the pump than we did six months ago, because Wall Street speculators are driving up the cost of the price per barrel through their efforts to make money.
And the same thing is happening with the price of a cup of coffee. Yes, there have been weather problems in Colombia and Brazil – but the price of coffee is going sky high because Wall Street speculators are buying and selling coffee in the futures trade – and their “gambling” is driving up the price of a cup of coffee and the retail price of a bag of coffee at the supermarket.
Most major American companies are American in name and address only. National headquarters may exist in the U.S. but all of their manufacturing and back office work is being done in one part of Asia or another.
We have discussed these cost-cutting strategies and the sending of American jobs to Asia in other pieces on this website. But there are other strategies as well. Front page headlines in the New York Times tell us that General Electric, now the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010. The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of that total came from operations in the United States. It’s tax bill from that profit line? Not a penny in taxes. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion. Low taxes – or none at all, has been a specialty of G.E. for years. The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the IRS for years resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinationals. How? Because of fierce lobbying of Congress and some very smart accountants taking every advantage of what Congress will allow them to do for G.E.
Many Americans still do not understand that the control of Big Business has returned with great power of the political purse and that those jobs lost will never be regained. That all over this country in small and middle- sized towns, jobs are gone and won’t return. That empty stores will remain empty; the favorite restaurants and diners are closing because their customers can no longer afford to eat there. That people are commuting more than two hours away from their homes just to get a job that really can barely sustain their former life-styles…their ability to make a mortgage payment, to purchase goods and services; to send their children to college. They are getting by but are no longer able to sustain a middle class life. We are developing a WalMart economy – an economy which cannot sustain the middle class as we have known it..
What we need are new industries because the industries we have had are controlled by Big Business which no longer has work for Americans. Big Business is working feverishly to prevent those new industries from getting a foothold in the economy.
How do they do this? As an example, by influencing Congress – as they did recently – to cut every single dollar out of the upcoming national budget for the development of alternative sources of energy: wind, solar, clean coal, etc. Money from the oil and natural gas companies did the job. Of course the vote for the budget is not yet final – but the intent is clear.
Big Business only wants ‘competition’ it can control. AT&T buys T-Mobile trying to become the biggest of only three phone companies in America. The legal battles will soon begin to decide that merger. Google which seeks to digitize every single book ever published – totally controlling information as no single entity has ever controlled it – may also face legal challenge.
The search by the industry for natural gas fields which involves ‘fracking’ a technology which digs deep into land to use explosive force to open a flow of gas, but which threatens to release poisons into wells and streams, is being contested by civic groups afraid of the disastrous results that are possible.
The list of Big Business activities to control what competition may exist within and without of their fields of interest goes on and on with the support of forces in America who do know what they know and who are eager to do battle with ‘do-gooders’ on every level.
It is no accident that the sudden power of Tea Partyists to not only elect their own Republican candidates in the face of the desires of the Republican Party itself, but to begin influencing all kinds of policy decisions, comes from the fact that the majority of them are over 60 years old, know what they are talking about and believe in – and know how to demonstrate their “outrage” to get the votes they want.
GUTTING THE UNIONS
We can call it the Wisconsin syndrome; the successful effort by a State to make much needed budget cuts without increasing taxes by not only changing the pay scales and benefits of service, teacher and municipal unions, but by legally exempting those unions from being able to bargain collectively on those issues.
The syndrome is growing daily in States throughout the country
Many Americans don’t understand that this is a total assault on what the teacher, service and municipal unions have secured for their members and that it is part of a plan to end the influence of all unions in this country. Most don’t know that the teacher’s union is now the largest union in America, followed by the service unions – hospitals and other institutions – and then by the State, County and Municipal Workers union…and that all together we are only talking about 8 million union members.
We don’t understand how one of the strongest unions in NY State – the construction workers – are no longer building a number of large residential apartment buildings now being built in New York City by non-union workers.
We don’t know anything about unions because our schools haven’t taught children about the union movement and its effect on American life for the past 30 years.
People in their early 40’s and younger don’t know what unions are about. They never heard of Samuel Gompers, William Green and George Meany of the AFL-CIO, of John L. Lewis President of the United Mine Workers and then the CIO, of Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers, of A. Phillip Randolph of the Sleeping Car Porters Union, of Phillip Murray, President of the United Steel Workers and certainly not of Eugene Debs, founder of the International Workers of the World (IWW-known as the Wobblies because they went to war with the hired guns who came to batter union strikers into submission) and five times a candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket.
The blue ribbon list of leaders above, are the Americans who built the unions and made the development of a middle class possible. These are the Americans who fought tooth and nail in every factory, mill, mine and sweatshop for years for every single change in working conditions so horrendous in every industry in America, that if they existed that way today, would so horrify us that we’d believe we were living in a Third World country.
These are the men who fought to make jobs safe as they fought to establish salary scales, pension benefits and whatever healthcare assistance they could get; men who had to keep fighting that fight in every annual negotiation. These fights went beyond words – they were sometimes wars with strikes and strikebreakers – furious physical struggles in the early years – for workers rights. Winning these struggles made it possible for America to grow that middle class and with it to become the powerful and free nation that we still believe we are.
As this is being written, we have reached the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in lower Manhattan in New York City. On November 22, 1909 there was a meeting in the Great Hall of Cooper Union of thousands of women who made shirtwaists- then and now a popular women’s fashion garment. They were mostly very young in their 20s, were recent immigrants to this country and were lucky to have found a job. They worked in factories in lower Manhattan six and seven days a week for weekly wages of about $5, jammed into dim lofts and in the back of stores. The union that existed at that time paid them little heed because it was led by men who were more interested in the men working higher-paying jobs and essentially wrote off these poorly paid women as hard to organize and unwilling to support a strike for more wages and better working conditions.
The meeting went on for several hours and at the end one of these young women, speaking Yiddish, stood up to proclaim that those in the room vote for a general strike of the industry. The audience roused by her words, rose to vote unanimously for a strike. In the days that followed, 20,000 to 40,000 men and women went out on strike. In February, 1910 most of the factories voted to recognize the Women’s Trade Union as the representative for the workers.
The union contracts that developed enforced safety standards: regulations about fire safety, fire drills, handling of scraps of paper patterns and cut material. One large factory refused to recognize the union: the Triangle Shirtwaist Company which became a prominent anti-union stronghold.
One year later on Saturday, March 25, 1911, in the last minutes of the work week, a match or a cigarette tossed into a waste basket ignited a fire that fed on the scraps of cloth and paper patterns hanging overhead. The blaze swept through the factory – the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of a ten story building and within half an hour 146 people were dead – all but a few, young women. About 50 of them jumped to their deaths to escape the relentless flames.
From that day on, union demands for safety were honored by all the companies in that dress-making business.
These union founders and builders- giants of their time – are gone now. Usually replaced by hand-picked successors, these ‘second generation’ labor leaders did not have the savvy to continue growth. They were satisfied to fight for the status quo established by others without realizing that as with any business, you must grow constantly – or you will lose ground. They in turn, have been replaced by men and women thinking and earning like corporate executives making similar salaries and perks and fighting first to maintain those salaries too often using the lives of their members as pawns.
And so the industrial unions of the CIO went away and many of the craft unions of the AFL, but there are still the Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers and the Steel and Electrical Workers. All that’s really left to deal with are the three largest unions – the teachers, service employees and government workers unions. And they are under attack by politicians, fueled by Big Business money, who have exactly the excuse they need: States are going bankrupt and they can no longer raise taxes – so the budget must be balanced on the backs of these three unions.
It doesn’t matter what State you look at, what you’ll see looks exactly the same. State politicians gave those unions what they wanted the same way that NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg gave Randi Weingarten’s Teachers union the largest salary increases they’d ever known as he wanted those 80,000 NYC teacher votes in his reelection bid.
Governors and State Legislators did the exact same thing. As they agreed to union requests for pay raises and increased benefits, they did not offset these costs by increasing taxes but instead often approved tax cuts – playing with accounting procedures to put obvious deficits in the following year’s budget – and so and so on.
Today we see benefits and pensions under attack and new levels of salaries for all those trying to become teachers or trying to get jobs in government. In a world in which we no longer produce much, Government is America’s largest employer. Increasingly new State laws are proposed which remove union rights to negotiate salaries and benefits for their members.
With many States on the edge of bankruptcy, the piper must be paid, the scapegoats identified, the cuts made and the lay-offs ordered.
THE RESULT
There is a good chance that State courts will throw out the actions of Governors and Legislatures. The matter may work itself up the legal ladder to a Supreme Court consideration. Many State judges are already seen to be in conflict about whether the States can simply eliminate a union’s right to do its job – a right approved by Federal Law.
What is more apparent is that whether or not unions hold on to what they have, there seems little evidence that the remaining unions alone can hang on to the middle class status they helped their members earn. Other help is needed.
The Presidential election campaign for 2012 has already begun. Republican names are being projected – it is clear that Barack Obama will be the Democratic incumbent running for reelection. There will be a great deal of time spent on trying to get America back to work…and there will be a lot of talk about it. New industrial development is critical to the discourse and that means that eventually the liberal forces in America are going to have to be gathered into a counterweight against the TeaParty people and those supporting the will of Big Business. Big Business will do everything it can to oppose the development of any new industrial strength in America. Money will be no object nor will there be a lack of people making something bad sound OK.
It’s up to the American people to begin listening to their gut reactions to what they hear. Too many of them will not be able to depend on their acquired knowledge to learn and fight for the direction they want for this country. Gut feelings need to be stimulated to “work” and liberal forces must begin building a fortress of ideas and attitudes to deal with the challenges that exist.
THE CAMERA EYE AND JOE HILL
they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspapereditors the old judges thecollegepresidents the wardheelers (listen America will not forget her betrayers) they hire the men with guns with uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons their hired men sit on the judge’s bench they sit back with their feet on the tables under the dome of State Houses they are ignorant of our beliefs they have the dollars and the guns the armed forces the powerplants
they have built the electricchair hired the executioner to throw the switch
all right we are two nations
now their work is over the immigrant haters of oppression lie in black suits in the little undertaking parlor in the North End the city is quiet the men of the conquering nation are not to be seen on the streets
the streets belong to the beaten nation all the way to the cemetery where the bodies of the immigrants are to be burned we line the curbs in the drizzling rain we crowd the wet sidewalks elbow to elbow silent pale looking with scared eyes at the coffins
we stand defeated America
A young Swede named Hillstrom went to sea, got himself calloused hands on sailingships and tramps, learned English on the steamers that make the run from Stockholm to Hull, dreamed the Swede’s dream of the West
When he got to America they gave him a job polishing cuspidors in a Bowery saloon.
He moved west to Chicago and worked in a machine shop
He moved west and followed the harvest, hung around employment agencies, paid out many a dollar for a job in a construction camp, walked out many a mile when the grub was too bum, or the boss too tough or found too many bugs in the bunkhouse;
Read Marx and the I.W.W. preamble and dreamed about forming the structure of a new society within the shell of the old.
He was in California for the Southern Pacific strike, used to play the concertina at the bunkhouse door after supper, had a knack for setting rebel words to tunes (And the union makes us strong.)
Along the coast in cookshacks, flophouses, jungles, wobblies, hoboes, bindlestiffs began singing Joe Hill’s songs. They sang them in the county jails in Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Idaho, in the bullpens in Montana and Arizona, sang ’em in WallaWalla, San Quentin and Leavenworth, forming the structure of the new society within the jails of the old.
At Bingham, Utah, Joe Hill organized the workers of the Utah Construction Company in the One Big Union, won a new wagescale, shorter hours, better grub. (The angel Moroni didn’t like labororganizers any better than the Southern Pacific did.)
The angel Moroni moved the hearts of the Mormons to decide it was Joe Hill shot a grocer named Morrison. The Swedish consul and President Wilson tried to get him a new trial, but the angel Moroni moved the hearts of the Supreme Court of the State of Utah to sustain the verdict of guilty. He was in jail a year, went on making up songs. In November, 1915 he was stood up against the wall in the jail yard in Salt Lake City.
‘Don’t mourn for me, organize’ was the last word he sent out to the workingstiffs of the I.W.W. Joe Hill stood up against the wall of the jail yard, looked into the muzzles of the guns and gave the word to fire.
They put him in a black suit, put a stiff collar around his neck and a bow tie, and shipped him back to Chicago for a bangup funeral and photographed his handsome stony mask staring into the future.
The first of May they scattered his ashes into the wind.
Martin I. Hassner
Executive Director
Website Managing Editor