Labor in America has no history. May First is not a memorial to American workers who died at the hands of police, Pinkertons and other corporate-hired thugs so the American Businessmen's Mafia could thwart the eight-hour day, the minimum wage, pensions, safety regulations, Social Security, Workers' Compensation, Unemployment Insurance - any "benefit" over and above subsistence, your ability to get back up and get back to the job and continue the work is just "too much" for business to have to bear.
And once they'd disappeared American Labor's entire history, and, in fact, rewrote history itself to suit corporations, the rest was easy. They're even painting the Employee Free Choice Act as a "commie plot", a threat to Western civilization which will undermine the American economy. As if "American" corporations hadn't already mined our economic infrastructure and imploded it in the controlled demolition of the current financial "crisis". Much like the World Trade Center, symbol of American financial hegemony, the American economy is collapsing in its own footprint.
And yet our "protests" are either comical, like the tea bagger farce,
or tragically sad, like the well-behaved delivery of a letter to one of AIG's over-bonused executives by protestor/supplicants. Twits attach tea bags to their hats and come out to protest when they're the ones due to get a tax cut. They're supporting their "Upper" Class tormentors' need for a tax cut, which means the tea bag-heads are actually not smarter than an artichoke, since they're protesting to retain their right to pay more in taxes to make up for what the tax cheats they're protesting on behalf of are hiding offshore, not to mention the subsidies, abatements and their suing their own country for future profits they could have made if all those silly safety and environmental regulations weren't in effect. But then again, these tea bag heads are probably the ones wearing hats festooned with two cans of beer and two straws or baseball caps with beaks sporting fake dog sh*t.
And these sub-artichokians will willingly become attack dogs for their tormentors - if Rush, et al, tells them to - focusing their seething, roiling, misplaced rage on their fellow victims, like those driven here by NAFTA and, in effect, fight the symptom rather then the disease, the system which is really oppressing them, ripping them off, stealing their jobs, anything rather than get down to the root - the real nitty gritty - of their immiseration, their debt slavery, because they're ashamed. They're ashamed not only of who they are - poor in America - but who they're not - the rich - the very deliberately made rich at the expense of all the rest of us, that 5%, 1%, .01% of "Americans" who believe they deserve the whole American pie.
And then we have the protestor/supplicants from Connecticut Working Families who chartered a bus and made an appointment to drive to the posh enclave called home by Douglas Poling, AIG's biggest bonus recipient, and hand-deliver a letter of protest to him. Since they'd made a appointment to protest, they were met by a few uniformed cops, as well as a couple undercovers, and two private body guards who paced the finely-manicured and landscaped lawn. Poling, made aware of the appointment, was not home at the time.
But the few cops and two bodyguards are all Poling, or any of America's plutocrats, need to cow us. They don't need high, concrete walls topped with electrified barbed wire to keep us out. They don't need armed Pinkertons keeping 24-hour watch over their precious, purloined private property. They rely on us. To know our place. They rely on our very carefully inculcated sense of shame at being poor in America, losers, not winners in the economic lottery. They rely on our feeling that we are less than they are, unworthy even to stand looking at their sacred suburban Garden of Mansions, that icon/emblem/enclave of mammon. We're outsiders. The majority of Americans are outsiders looking in on the American dream, albeit a very shallow dream of owning things. They own. We owe. But we are a majority oppressed by our own shame nonetheless.
And as 32.55 million of us receive food stamps, and another 16 million of us are eligible for them, more than 25% of us earn poverty wages and more than 600,000 of us lose our jobs every month, the Obama Administration is leading the charge to push down the living standards of American workers, enforcing the strategy of the plutocracy by way of wage-cutting by Big Business. The Obama Administration has legitimized this with its demands on Chrysler and GM, where new-hires' wages have been slashed by 50% and cost-of-living raises totally burned, obliterated.
In addition, wages have been lowered for Microsoft contractors, much of the newspaper industry and in many state and local governments. Honda, H-P, Best Buy and Fed Ex have announced wage cuts. Wages for temp workers are falling. Nineteen percent of American workers aged 29 or younger are unemployed. Incomes fell for the third consecutive month in March. Job losses and wage cuts have left American workers to balance on the knife edge of poverty, hunger and homelessness.
The Obama Administration's enforcement of wage-cutting at Chrysler and GM echoes, exactly, the actions of Obama's political idol, Ronald Reagan, whose destruction of PATCO was the opening shot for the government-sanctioned tsunami of union-busting and strike-breaking still in force, the leading edge of which is the effort to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act.
Our president has told us Americans should "consume less and save more". His policies are forcing the majority of American workers to consume less and allowing the plutocracy to save more, stuffing it into those silk-lined pockets. "American" corporations are demanding unconscionable wage cuts while threatening workers with the outsourcing card and relying on co-opted union officials to sell out the rank and file.
And if we get hungry enough, or we start hurting enough to do some real protesting, here is where history kicks in. In the space of a few short years we lost JFK, RFK and MLK. Several students were killed at Kent and Jackson State. We backed off and didn't look back at the history of the Class War in America, which is, after all, a "classless" society. We allowed the brutality with which the labor movement in America was always put down to remain buried. Americans have learned that every time we rise up, we are viciously whipped back down, leading to an obedient, peasant mentality. We "know better" than to get uppity. We've become victims of Maggie Thatcher's notorious TINA dictum, "there is no alternative." We allow our children to be mis-educated, as we were, to pledge allegiance and abject obedience to nationalism, xenophobia and consumerism, to accept their place in the pecking order. We just knuckle under and get down to work. (If we're still allowed to have a job.)
And we still have the nerve to pretend "it" can't happen here. Benito Mussolini defined "it" best - "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.". But perhaps, since we're mis-educated and TV-engineered to be less smart than artichokes, we're able to ignore all the evidence we see around us, refusing to see what our own "lying" eyes are telling us. Maybe we're just afraid. Not without good reason. But maybe we're just not hungry enough. Yet. But in the event we finally get fed up with being economically waterboarded, when we're sick of suffering real, not simulated, drowning as the value of our homes goes underwater, well the plutocracy is prepared for that eventuality. Their minions, the Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress stand ready to put us down again, if need be, just like President Herbert Hoover sent Generals Patton and MacArthur, the 12th Infantry, the 3rd Cavalry and six tanks to charge into the Bonus Army with fixed bayonets and adamsite gas during the Depression.
Our own Dear Leaders have already brought combat-hardened troops back from Iraq to deal with us in case we cause "civil unrest". Remember. Posse comitatus is history. Not to mention habeas corpus. And if our combat troops won't turn on their own people, today's Pinkertons, the hired contractor-killers of Blackwater (now Xe) will. They were on the job for the plutocracy in New Orleans after Katrina. That was just a dry run. They're ready for you, too.
And if you further insist on getting a fair share of the wealth you produce with your labor, they'll send you on a vacation - to one of Halliburton's Holiday Hotels, constructed for FEMA under REX-84. This turned abandoned World War II German and Italian POW camps in the U.S. (Did you know we had these on American soil?), Japanese internment camps, closed army bases and mental institutions into detention camps, ostensibly for when we're overrun by "illegal" aliens, but actually for the uppity. And they're staffed and waiting for us where we will, perhaps help "American" transnationals achieve corporate nirvana - forced, no-wage labor.
"Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change. Each time a person stands up for an idea, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, (s)he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." - Robert F. Kennedy
"No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied 'til justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream." - Dr. Martin Luther King
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