Labor Day as Memorial Holiday; Middle Class R.I.P.

We'd hoped that a strong Democratic congress and Obama in the White House would stanch the bleeding.

It didn't happen. The Whitehouse rescued big finance and the auto industry but did nothing for millions of homeowners facing foreclosure. Congress pretended to pass financial reform while simultaneously gutting real reform, with the White House helping to weaken things like auditing the Fed or building in real, tough regulations.

The result is, the middle class is worse off now than it was in 2008. Pathetic, suck-up apologists for spineless or sold out Democratic legislators are telling us that Obama did what he could. The poor legislators were hamstrung by filibustering Republicans.

Bullshit.

Obama and the Democrats were given historic powers-- a filibuster-proof majority in the senate, even. And they threw the power away. They wasted time, they made excuses. They were weak when they had to be strong. They sold out the middle class again and again.

So now, we have labor day for a skeletal working force. We have laws that allow, even encourage corporations to out-source jobs, not just low level jobs, but high-paying ones. No wonder there are millions of unemployed. No wonder the word is that those millions of jobs may never come back.

It used to be that labor day was a day to celebrate the worker. Perhaps now, we should seeing labor day as a memorial for the short time in American history when workers were honored and through their salaries and living wages, respected.

Perhaps, as David Letterman suggests, we should make Labor Day a celebration of the Chinese worker. Or maybe we should celebrate the worker in America before Bill Clinton signed globalization agreements like WTO and NAFTA, which, as Ross Perot accurately predicted, created that great sucking sound of millions of lost jobs.

I don't understand why the millions of unemployed have not rised up and made a lot of noise-- a hell of a lot of noise. Where are their spines? Have they been beated down so badly that they can't speak up, stand up and insist that the White House and congress do at least as good a job rescuing them as they did the banksters.

How about a labor day that gets people out in the streets? Reading Huffington's book, Third World America, I had a hard time, repeatedly, putting the book down, getting really angry. Why aren't the mainstream media telling the story of the death and dying of the middle class? During WWII there were Nazi horrors, mass murders that were reported after the fact. Now, we have mass firings, rapid destructions of major American Industries causing losses of hundreds of thousand or millions of jobs. These are American Disasters-- a job holocaust afflicting tens of millions of Americans.

Throw a labor day party for candidates who are making strong commitments to pass real legislation. Push those candidates to throw out the sell-outs who chair the house and senate committees. Push to end the seniority system in congress that contributes to a legislative system which has consistently worsened the plight of the middle class.

This year, on Labor day, take a few moments to write a letter and mail it. Or draft a few thoughts to say when you call your legislator's office the day after labor day.

The time to celebrate labor day is over. It's time to use the paid time off to fight for fellow workers and for your own job. We should have been doing that for years, but now, the writing on the wall is so clear, we need to be sure next year is the first year that Labor Day is known as a day of strong protest.