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Well we can’t be posting sunshine everyday here at DWR. A small reminder of what the people of our nations are up against. From the essay titled Revolution and American Empire by Rob Urie.
“Liberal economists have ‘fought the good fight’ for nominally populist economic programs for the last decade with little but growing frustration to show for it. In sequence, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama enacted economic policies— deregulation of banks, tax cuts for the very wealthy, the largest bank bailouts in human history and ‘trade’ deals that formalize corporate control over civil governance. There exist economic theories to support each and every one of these policies. Many prominent economists base which economic policies they support or oppose on which political Party is in office at the time they are proposed. The policies enacted are retroactively deemed ‘politically feasible’ in tacit admission that economic outcomes are politically determined. ‘Markets’ are used to explain these outcomes with the politics removed.
From the time of the American Revolution to today, with a brief compromise between 1948 and about 1973, the U.S. has been run by and for a self-serving plutocracy. Slavery and genocide weren’t ‘accidents’ nor were they the product of primitive thinking. U.S. wars in Central America, Southeast Asia and Iraq were / are as primitive, in the sense of being for-profit and brutal, as any in human history. And it is hardly an accident that elite impunity and immunity from prosecution for crimes, including War Crimes, is matched by brutal repression of the economic underclasses. Banks and corporations are the social forms of economic imperialism, necessary to the imperial project that places the rest of us as imperial subjects. Back to the start: the American Revolution was fought for the freedom to repress while the revolutions of liberation it has opposed were / are by-and-large fought against it.
The obligatory liberal chides against Russian and Cuban totalitarianism, in their contemporary incarnations against ‘strongman’ Vladimir Putin and the aging Fidel Castro, never admit to two centuries of American crimes or to never ending U.S. attempts to undermine democratic revolutions around the globe. This isn’t to gloss over crimes— the U.S. is the only nation in history to drop atom bombs on largely civilian populations, U.S. General Curtis LeMay joked that had the U.S. lost WWII he would have hung for the bombing of Tokyo, three million killed in the Korean War, three million killed in Vietnam, one million killed in Iraq and substantial portions of Central America turned into right-wing gangster states. Cuba is poor today because the U.S. has enforced an economic blockade of it for half a century. And the only guarantee from ‘liberalized’ relations between the U.S. and Cuba is that Cuba will get the worst of it.”
[Source:Counterpunch]
I am tired of the bad rap Unions get. You know why they get a bad rap, because they are one of the few institutions in society that can mount effective opposition to corporate power. You like your 8 hour work day? Thank unions for that. Health and Safety regulations? Thank a union for it. You know why you’re thanking a union and not your employer? It’s because they don’t give two shitz about you, your family or your future.
Union history does not get taught in the classrooms because of course like actual democracy, it is a threat to corporate control and power. I’ve been reading Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Hedges and Sacco and I will share a few excerpts with you today.
“Workers in this country paid for their right by suffering brutal beatings, mass expulsions from company housing and jobs, crippling strikes, targets assassinations of union leaders, and armed battles with hired-gun thugs and state militias. Unions created the middle class. They opened up our democracy. Federal Marshals, state militias, sheriff’s deputies and at times even U.S. Army troops, along with the courts and legislative bodies, were repeatedly used to crush organized workers. Striking sugar cane workers were gunned down in Thibodaux, Louisiana, in 1887. Steel workers were shot to death in 1892, in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Railroad workers were murdered in the nationwide Pullman strike of 1894. Coal miners were massacred at Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914 and at Matewan, West Virginia, in 1920.
The Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Carnegies, and the Morgans – the Goldman Sachs and Walmart of their day – never gave a damn about workers. All they cared about was profit. The eight-hour workday, the minimum wage, Social Security, pensions, job safety, paid vacations, retirement benefits and health insurance were achieved because hundreds of thousands of workers physically fought a system of capitalist exploitation. They rallied around radicals such as Mary Harris “Mother” Jones – arrested at one point in the West Virginia coalfields for reading the Declaration of Independence to a crowd of miners – United Mine Workers’ President John L. Lewis, and “Big” Bill Haywood and his Wobblies, as well as Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.
“The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle […].” Frederick Douglas said. “If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. […]” […] Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. “
From Days of Destruction Days of Revolt p. 159 – 160.
So before your next anti-union rant, maybe just stop and think of all things you are benefiting from right now that was paid for in blood and misery by people who had the courage and will to demand justice in society.
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