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Which Mob Are You In?
At a recent protest against Governor Scott Walker’s so-called Budget Repair Bill in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, a 61 year-old woman waving an American flag told me her grandfather came from Russia to work in Oshkosh’s now-defunct Paine Lumber Mill.
(Photo by Ken Ilio / Flipped Out)
“With no union then,” she said, “if you lost your arm in a saw, you were out-of-luck, laid-off the next day, and not getting anything from the company.”
She went on to tell me that she had never protested publicly before in her life.
“I never saw the reason to,” she said, “but now, this is too big to not stand up against.”
Big, indeed, because unions guarantee the ability of individuals to assume a voice more powerful than their own. Without them, we are left to advocate alone for our interests against often faceless employers that increasingly span continents. Unions—and social movements like the one Wisconsin has spawned in the past month—are the few collective voices left in the United States loud enough to resist corporate executives and politicians manipulating the market to their own advantage. This explains why many politicians all over the country aim to weaken them.
In Wisconsin, Governor Walker’s administration has also simultaneously tried to restrict access to public spaces such as Wisconsin’s Capitol building. The ubiquitous chant of “Whose house? Our house!” at Madison protests is not just sloganeering. It is rooted in the concrete way the Capitol symbolizes shared experiences of public services that benefit all citizens, not just those who can pay for them.
If free market ideologues have their way, however, de-regulation and privatization will allow corporations to colonize public institutions. In Wisconsin and Michigan, for example, legislation is being considered that would permit corporations to run multiple schools and municipalities. Such laws are promoted in the name of a very limited definition of freedom that privileges the unrestricted liberty to make profit over the liberty for citizens to participate in community decisions.
Corporations, because they are only responsible to the profit motivations of stockholders, have little incentive to be democratic or to self-regulate: to provide safe working conditions, to pay their workers a living wage, or ensure their activities don’t spoil the ecosystems that all life depends on. American history makes this clear. Safer working conditions, fairer wages, and more ecologically responsible business practices have arisen when unions and social movements forced companies and the government to grant and enforce these changes.
The deregulated, union-less economies that Scott Walker and his cronies desire exist in so-called developing countries all over the world. I have lived in Central America and witnessed the misery that the lack of labor and environmental regulations creates. A sewage-ridden lake you can smell from half-a-mile away. A family living on rice and beans in a dirt-floored, sheet-metal shack because the Coca-Cola bottling plant only pays the father $100 a month for full-time work. Banana plantation workers with deformed babies because Dole forced them to use a pesticide known to cause birth defects with no protective gear.
All Americans can agree that this is not the kind of society we want. Unfortunately, this agreement gets often overlooked in the controversy over unions, though unions are one of the few means we have left to collectively prevent a spiral back toward such a future.
Supporters of anti-union laws and de-regulation assert that we no longer need to be concerned about the abuses of people and land that were commonplace in the 19th and 20th centuries. We have laws that prohibit such abuses, they say. Yet many of these same people are currently proposing the curtailing of the Environmental Protection Agency and the ability of unions to negotiate their working conditions. Furthermore, these advocates for de-regulation overlook the many recent examples of corporate exploitation in the U.S.: the BP oil disaster, the economic crisis-profiteering of Goldman Sachs, Walmart’s failure to pay a living wage. The list could go on and on. Not because corporations are evil, but because they simply fulfill their primary purpose to improve their bottom lines. Therefore, they require public oversight and a strong collective voice for people and places affected by corporate activities.
Unions provide this voice, and perhaps just as importantly, they offer a bulwark of communal purpose in an otherwise relentlessly fracturing culture. Where else but a rally defending union rights can you see social workers and police, snowplow drivers and professors, shouting the word “We”? But the Main Street Movement that emerged in Wisconsin has also become about much more than unions. It has reasserted the importance of the public sphere in a democracy and citizen participation beyond voting.
In recent weeks, opponents of the Main Street Movement ranging from Wisconsin U.S. Senator Ron Johnson to Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald have dismissed the hundreds of thousands of peaceful protestors in Wisconsin as a “mob.” Johnson and Fitzgerald join past opponents of the five-day work week, minimum wage, women’s suffrage, and civil rights on the wrong side of history. All of these goals were accomplished by nonviolent protesters claiming rights now considered central to American life.
The word “mob” derives from the Latin phrase mobile vulgus, “changeable common people.” When politicians like Johnson and Fitzgerald utter “mob” to scare middle-class Americans from joining together, they epitomize the word’s condescending, classist roots. Now, as always, such mobster union-busters and de-regulators use the deep-rooted tension in American life between individualism and community to pit worker against worker. They blackmail us by threatening to take our jobs if we don’t give up our rights.
But the spreading resistance shows gangster government isn’t working. First in Wisconsin, then Ohio, Indiana, and onward, citizen togetherness is gathering steam, as it did during the Progressive movement, the women’s suffrage movement, and the civil rights movement. Which mob am I in? Count me with the 61 year-old, flag-waving granddaughter of an Oshkosh mill worker, shouting to keep a voice at all.
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27 Comments so far
Show All"Supporters of anti-union laws and de-regulation assert that we no longer need to be concerned about the abuses of people and land that were commonplace in the 19th and 20th centuries. We have laws that prohibit such abuses, they say."
These are probably the same people assuring us that there is no evidence for climate change and that those companies we refer to as Wall Street do not need additional regulations. Thanks for the assurances but I remain unconvinced.
In 2005 amidst the intense abuses of customers by credit card companies the Bankruptcy Protection and Consumer Protection Act was passed, which weakened the protections consumer and other debtors could obtain in bankruptcy court.
Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and co-author of the "The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke" along with others, convinced me that this legislation was just another way to squeeze the middle class for ever thing they've got.
For some reason, I can't remember exactly, Republicans were once again complaining about class warfare as if class warfare necessarily involved some kind of insidious discrimination against the wealthy. Somebody probably wanted to raise taxes on the rich!
That's when it hit me. I guess I am a little slow about some things. But I realized right then, that there was a class war going on and it wasn't the middle class / working class, or the poor who had initiated the class war. It was the wealthy. And the wealthy and powerful were once again changing the rules of the game in their favor.
John Lennon had a lyric: "A working class hero is something to be."
Well, I far as I am concerned Elizabeth Warren - Harvard law professor, Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and current Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) - although not a radical is nevertheless just like those folks in the streets in Madison, Wisconsin a working class hero!
Some people said she shouldn't take the top job at the CFPB which the Obama administration clearly wanted to give to someone else and as compromised as the bureau clearly would be right from the beginning. I don't know whether she would have been better off going back to Harvard, but at least Elizabeth Warren is fighting the good fight.
Today, Common Dreams features an article by Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation titled "Who's Afraid of Elizabeth Warren?"
URL: www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/14-12
Which mob am I in? Count me in with the taxpayers, who seem to be forgotten in this dispute. There's no question about the need for unions when the employer is a greedy capitalist with no concern for worker safety, but in this case, the employer is the public which means that the strikers are striking against their neighbors, many of whom don't have a job themselves.
Spoken exactly like a tool, witting or unwitting, of the corporatists who want us to attack each other while they laugh all the way to their Swiss bank accounts and offshore tax havens.
Strikers strike for ALL workers. Read some labor history.
Corporatists want control of workers and elimination of ALL unions, private and public, which would then assure that control.
Falling into the trap of being pitted against ourselves plays right into the hands of the corporatists and can only end in 21st century serfdom.
Quite right, ED.
This is a variation of the classic meme of "Der Dolchstoß"-- "Stabbed in the Back!"-- that is so seductive to the reactionary underclass*.
It IS sadly true that Amerikan labor unions generally have been relentlessly co-opted, intimidated, beguiled, and flim-flammed into making losing deals with the devils of the power elite. This self-destructive spiral, beginning in the New Deal era, has the unfortunate side-effect of making unionism seem like "part of the problem" because of their institutional exclusiveness, corruption, and collusion with their natural adversaries.
But the essential necessity and virtue of bottom-up collective worker organization and action can be reformed and rehabilitated if unions are supported insofar as they "re-radicalize" and return to their appropriately militant, democratic roots.
Short-sighted "useful idiocy", including the myth that unions are themselves part of, or equivalent to, the predatory power elite of "special interests" opposed to the interests of ordinary unprivileged citizens and common weal, must be challenged and exposed as the socioeconomic propaganda that it is-- not mindlessly and uncritically echoed.
PS: Chris Hedges, as usual, nails just this point in today's article published at CD and Truthdig:
"The public debate, dominated by corporate-controlled systems of information, ignores the steady impoverishment of the working class and absence of legal and regulatory mechanisms to prevent mounting corporate fraud and abuse. The airwaves are saturated with corporate apologists. They ask us why public-sector employees have benefits—sneeringly called “entitlements”—which nonunionized working- and middle-class people are denied. This argument is ingenious. It pits worker against worker in a mad scramble for scraps. And until we again speak in the language of open class warfare, grasping, as those who went before us did, that the rich will always protect themselves at our expense, we are doomed to a 21st century serfdom."
______________________
* See: "Stabbed in the back! The past and future of a right-wing myth" by Kevin Baker
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/06/0081080
Derby Lad is just ignorant of and/or brainwashed about the enormous number of policy alternatives (to assaulting public sector unions and stripping them of collective bargaining rights) that were deliberately foregone by DLC Dimocrats, Rethuglicans and Tea Baggers in the service of the plutocrats who cut their election campaign checks.
Examples:
Eliminating Bush II's historically unprecedented and fiscally insane wartime tax cuts for centemillionaires and billionaires; cutting back on agricultural subsidies for globalized giant corporate farms and celebrity "farmers" using farms as a tax haven; closing corporate tax loopholes that allowed, according to a recent General Accounting Office (GAO) report, fully half of America's corporations not to pay a single dime in taxes in 2010, including Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo (all three received $Billions in TARP handouts), General Electric, Boeing, and Exxon-Mobile, who not only didn't pay any taxes, but got a $1.1 Billion dollar refund from the Internal Revenue Service; passing a small stock and financial trade tax on Wall Street (something EU nations have done for decades that has the added benefit of reducing market volatility--something we could use during rampant over-speculation on oil and food); and reducing the Pentagon budget back to at least Cold War levels. We now spend three times peak annual Cold War defense budgets on the Pentagon and have only a national and global proliferation of terrorism, terrorist attacks and attempted terrorist attacks and spreading Middle East instability to show for it--oh, and plenty of profits for war profiteers like munitions, oil, mercenary, privatized intelligence and oil services & military logistics companies whose CEOs are cronies of Democratic Party and Republican Party leaders.
All these ideas are individually supported in polls by a majority of the American people--who are too intellectually lazy, and too easily corporately divided and conquered like Derby Lad to organize to push them into law.
But Wisconsin, Ohio, Indianapolis, etc., ALL could've solved their fiscal crises by forming a State-owned bank like they have in North Dakota--a State which is currently running a budget surplus. For more info on State-owned banks:
How Wisconsin Could Turn Austerity into Prosperity: Own a Bank
by Ellen Brown, Monday, March 7, 2011 CommonDreams.org
Letting fascists claw out State budget shortfalls from unionized public sector workers AND strip them of their collective bargaining rights due to the cost effects of a $14 Trillion dollar un-prosecuted Wall Street fraud (the largest fraud in world history); followed by a $2.3 Trillion dollar TARP & TALF handout (plus bonuses) to reward crooked bankers who participated in that fraud; followed by a $1 Trillion dollar TARP handout to profitable neo-liberal crony corporations (for the campaign finance bribery heck of it); followed by a $1.2 Trillion dollar fiscal 2012 military/security budget that's four (4) times the $300 Billion we spent per year on the Pentagon at the peak of the Cold War when we faced a legitimate nuclear super-power threat, plus endless demands from the upper-class for more tax cuts of all kinds on corporations and billionaires when, since 2000 (largely due to corporate offshoring of jobs) those tax cuts for the rich and super-rich haven't created even enough new service wage jobs to keep pace with the growth in population, let alone jobs that pay enough to raise family--well, it's all obscenely immoral, inexcusable and deeply anti-American.
Which side are you on, Derby Lad? Greedhead plutocrats or the working-class? Do you really think the working-class will be less at the mercy of the plutocracy if public sector unions are gutted? When Reagan took office in 1980, 20% of the U.S. workforce was unionized. Now it's down to 6.9% Has all this union busting improved conditions, pay, pensions or anything else for the American working-class and middle-class? Public sector unions ARE the last, strongest bastion of the working middle-class. Once they're defeated--what next? There will be no middle-class if people like you keep letting yourselves get suckered into the classic laissez-faire capitalist divide & conquer strategy.
Your point has been thoughtfully responded to and refuted. Do you have a response?
Agreed.
"the employer is the public which means that the strikers are striking against their neighbors, many of whom don't have a job themselves."
I call bullshit to that. Private employees only work for the company that hires them while public employees work for everyone in the represented land.
As an unemployed taxpaying US citizen, I demand my fellow working class public employees have collective bargaining rights, retirememt and disability benefits, a lliving wage with cost of living increases and paid vacations and sick days. I refuse to be a party to exploiting my fellow working class citizens merely because they work for me.
Please leave "my" mob!
How do you like them apples?
Sheesh!
Working people including working people who are members of unions, are taxpayers, income tax payers.
Working people, retired people and the unemployed, at least any where there is a sales tax, are taxpayers.
Own a home? own a car? You are a taxpayer!
The middle class and the poor pay most of the taxes!
I use to live and work in Mexico, where many U.S. companies moved their businesses, most because they are anti-union and wanted to exploit the poverty in Mexico, for their own greed. The U.S government has allowed this to happen in China and other places around the world, because they are all part of the same mob.
The government didn't just "allow" this to happen, they encouraged and enabled it. Good to keep reminding ourselves that the Powers That Be have no loyalty to America or any other country. They are a class apart and operate only for their own benefit, country be damned. They spout patriotic PR only when that's the spin that seems to put them in the best light.
Nicely done, Mr. Haynes. Thank you.
"Not because corporations are evil, but because they simply fulfill their primary purpose to improve their bottom lines."
WRONG. Corporations beyond a certain size and wealth level ARE EVIL. Especially when they and their owners operate outside the law using crony politicians to abuse the levers of all three branches of government to cover-up, aid and abet their worst crimes against We The People.
Even Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, was leery of corporations (he referred to them as "joint stock companies"). He said he could only think of a few circumstances where they should be allowed to exist and that they should be WELL REGULATED. I think subsequent history has shown that large and especially multinational corporations will ALWAYS undermine, bribe their way around or legalistically circumvent good regulation and should not be allowed to exist beyond the size of a medium-sized family owned business.
We have fascist corporate oligarchy running the U.S. now with one system of government, law, law enforcement, education, medicine, food distribution (and quality) for the corporate class and another for the rest of us BECAUSE we suffer the very existence of large, globalized corporations. And FAR FAR TOO MANY American "liberals" and corporatist "progressives" (the purest oxymoron) are addicted to and dependent on stock dividends from offshored factories using foreign labor. That last is the ultimate hypocrisy of the DLC McLeft and all its apologists.
The McLeft, cuter but still murderous clowns.
Brings to mind Joe Hill's dad. Get it?
...COMBINING THE DEMOCRATS MORAL SUPERIORITY COMPLEX WITH THE REPUBICANS SUPEREGORITORY BELIEF IN THEIR UNERRING GRASP OF REALITY..has resulted in a one party system ... the american lemming party...all aboard...
Gore Vidal has been saying that since 1968 or earlier -- there is one party, the Property Party, with two wings. Until an actual viable third party can come into being to rid us of the "two party system," who are definitely in cahoots with one another, no good can come from electioneering.
Like liberal demonizing, union demonizing propaganda has been very successful
Without collective bargaining, unions have virtually nothing unique to stand on and have hence lost their identity. It's amazing that it took a Republican to wake the public up on it !
Way too many Righties and DLC Dim apologists who post on this site are just ignorant of and/or brainwashed about the enormous number of policy alternatives to assaulting public sector unions and stripping them of collective bargaining rights that were deliberately foregone by DLC Dimocrats, Rethuglicans and Tea Baggers in the service of the plutocrats who cut their election campaign checks.
Examples:
Eliminating Bush II's historically unprecedented and fiscally insane wartime tax cuts for centemillionaires and billionaires; cutting back on agricultural subsidies for globalized giant corporate farms and celebrity "farmers" using farms as a tax haven; closing corporate tax loopholes that allowed, according to a recent General Accounting Office (GAO) report, fully half of America's corporations not to pay a single dime in taxes in 2010, including Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo (all three received $Billions in TARP handouts), General Electric, Boeing, and Exxon-Mobile, who not only didn't pay any taxes, but got a $1.1 Billion dollar refund from the Internal Revenue Service; passing a small trade transaction tax on Wall Street (something EU nations have done for decades that has the added benefit of reducing market volatility--something we could use during rampant over-speculation on oil and food); and reducing the Pentagon budget back to at least Cold War levels. We now spend three times peak annual Cold War defense budgets on the Pentagon and have only a national and global proliferation of terrorism, terrorist attacks and attempted terrorist attacks and spreading Middle East instability to show for it--oh, and plenty of profits for war profiteers like munitions, oil, mercenary, privatized intelligence and oil services & military logistics companies whose CEOs are cronies of Democratic Party and Republican Party leaders.
All these ideas are individually supported in polls by a majority of the American people--who are too intellectually lazy, and too easily corporately divided and conquered to organize to push them into law.
But Wisconsin, Ohio, Indianapolis, etc., ALL could've solved their fiscal crises by forming a State-owned bank like they have in North Dakota--a State which is currently running a budget surplus. For more info on State-owned banks:
How Wisconsin Could Turn Austerity into Prosperity: Own a Bank
by Ellen Brown, Monday, March 7, 2011 CommonDreams.org
Letting fascists claw out State budget shortfalls from unionized public sector workers AND strip them of their collective bargaining rights due to the cost effects of a $14 Trillion dollar un-prosecuted Wall Street fraud (the largest fraud in world history); followed by a $2.3 Trillion dollar TARP & TALF handout (plus bonuses) to reward crooked bankers who participated in that fraud; followed by a $1 Trillion dollar TARP handout to profitable neo-liberal crony corporations (for the campaign finance bribery heck of it); followed by a $1.2 Trillion dollar fiscal 2012 military/security budget that's four (4) times the $300 Billion we spent per year on the Pentagon at the peak of the Cold War when we faced a legitimate nuclear super-power threat, plus endless demands from the upper-class for more tax cuts of all kinds on corporations and billionaires when, since 2000 (largely due to corporate offshoring of jobs) those tax cuts for the rich and super-rich haven't created even enough new service wage jobs to keep pace with the growth in population, let alone jobs that pay enough to raise family--well, it's all obscenely immoral, inexcusable and deeply anti-American.
Which side are you on, Righties and Obama apologists? Greedhead plutocrats or the working-class? Do you really think the working-class will be less at the mercy of the plutocracy if public sector unions are gutted? When Reagan took office in 1980, 20% of the U.S. workforce was unionized. Now it's down to 6.9% Has all this union busting improved conditions, pay, pensions or anything else for the American working-class and middle-class? Public sector unions ARE the last, strongest bastion of the working middle-class. Once they're defeated--what next? There will be no middle-class if people like you keep letting yourselves get suckered into the classic laissez-faire capitalist divide & conquer strategy.
I see a lot more Obama apologists on other progressive/liberal blogs and here's the scoop. Right now, they loudly proclaim to be on the side of the workers but when challenged about Obama, they'll get very defensive and violent. They'll try to discount us as "do nothing whiners" even after educating them about their "infinite loop" approach where they protest "rah rah rah", elect the same perpetrators, and the cycle continues. Consistency isn't their forte as you can tell. I've been saying all along that while there's no doubt that we need to protest, strike, and boycott for the sake of waking up the public on what needs to change, we also have to be consistent in our efforts. When asked about their preferences on electing people who will honor the protests, strikes, and boycotts with great policies or electing the same people who will get us back to square one, they either don't answer or blow up about it. The Obama reelection campaign has just begun with the Walker case just like the Bush reelection campaign began with the 2003 Gray Davis recall. If you notice, the Republicans are putting up the biggest doofuses and I'm starting to think that even without high voting turnout that Obama's quest for a second term is looking more like a cake walk even though the US Senate is heading towards Republican takeover and the US House thanks to redistricting will stay solid Republican. Interesting times ahead.
What difference to the working class is there between the Democrats and the Republicans? They are both ruling class parties, whose interests are diametrically opposed to the working class.
Liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican, it doesn't matter. These are all parties used to advance the goals of the class between the ruling class and the working class, the "middle class" who strive to be the future ruling class.
That's exactly right but you won't see the party partisans being that honest. Right now, you'll see the party loyalists associating all protesters with the Democratic Party when that's not necessarily true when you look at the numbers in WI that are protesting. The numbers can only go so high until it's not about Republicans or Democrats but about working class Americans. Right now, the Obama PR cults are using the 14 Democrats in WI who walked out to paint all Democrats as standing for the middle class when nothing could be farther from the truth. Wait until next year when the Obama scums bring up the Walker boogieman or something like that to get themselves reelected if the Republican doofus candidates weren't bad enough as they are.
Lets cut to the chase. I am with the workers of the United States and not with the politicians who threaten shutdowns, furloughs, cutting salaries, pensions and the rest of this insane talk. The facts are the RIGHT does not like our President and wants to embarrass him at every turn. All I hear from them is cut, cut cut not one iota of anything that makes or sounds like the great United States that we are or can be again. Negativity no, Progress yes.NOW!!!!!!
This country cannot and will not survive if we have no workers to compete with foreign workers who have better rights than us. Whether you are in private or public service it's time to say stop this ridiculous circus in Washington and due your work for the citizens of this United States who pays you. You are only in DC for two and six years and you can be voted out.
This is a wake-up call to all workers and I say it's our turn to say we ain't your pawns no more.
There first attempt will be to divide us, then we do their work for them. The second attempt will be threats, enough people jailed without reason to intimidate the rest of us,subliminal messages in commercials and every show on TV.
If we somehow resist this (unlikely) THEN a force of mercenary bruisers will be sent house-to-house to intimidate, search, be inpudent even as they call you 'sir, and leave only after being begged. They will have plenty of time. They have only one house to do tonight.
Why hasn't Mr. Walker played 'catch' with a semi-trailer truck yet?