1797 (United States)
Profit sharing originated at Albert Gallatin's glass works in New Geneva,
Pennsylvania.
[edit] 1800s
1806 (United States)
Commonwealth vs. Pullis was the first reported case arising from a labor
strike in the United States. After a three day trial, the jury found the
defendants guilty of "a combination to raise their wages".
[edit] 1820s
27 April 1825 (United States)
Carpenters in Boston were the first to stage a strike for the 10-hour
work-day.
[edit] 1830s
3 July 1835 (United States)
Children employed in the silk mills in Paterson, New Jersey go on strike for
the 11 hour day, 6 days a week.
[edit] 1840s
March 1842 (United States)
Commonwealth v. Hunt was a landmark legal decision by the Massachusetts
Supreme Judicial Court on the subject of labor unions. Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw
ruled that unions were legal organizations and had the right to organize and
strike. Before this decision, labor unions which attempted to 'close' or create
a unionized workplace could be charged with conspiracy. See Commonwealth vs.
Pullis
1847 (Scotland)
The Educational Institute of Scotland, the oldest teachers' trade union in
the world, was founded.
[edit] 1850s
July 1851 (United States)
Two railroad strikers are shot dead and others injured by the state militia
in Portage, New York.
21 April 1856 (Australia)
Stonemasons and building workers in Melbourne achieve an Eight-hour day, the
first organised workers in the world to achieve an 8 hour day, with no loss of
pay.
[edit] 1860s
1860 (United States)
800 women operatives and 4,000 workmen marched during a shoemaker's strike
in Lynn, Massachusetts.
1863 (United States)
The first railroad labor union, The Brotherhood of the Footboard (later
renamed the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers) is formed in Marshall,
Michigan.
1866 (United States)
National Labor Union formed - 1st national labor federation in the US.
1868 (Germany)
The General German Federation of Trade Unions (ADGB) was founded and
represented 142,000 workers.[1]
1869 (United States)
Uriah Stephans organized a new union known as the Knights of Labor.
[edit] 1870s
13 January 1874 (United States)
The original Tompkins Square Riot. As unemployed workers demonstrated in New
York City's Tompkins Square Park, a detachment of mounted police charged into
the crowd, beating men, women and children indiscriminately with billy clubs and
leaving hundreds of casualties in their wake.
Commented Abram Duryee, the Commissioner of Police: "It was the most
glorious sight I ever saw..."
12 February 1877 (United States)
Great Railroad Strike -- U.S. railroad workers began strikes to protest wage
cuts.[1]
21 June 1877 (United States)
Ten coal-mining activists ("Molly Maguires") were hanged in Pennsylvania.
14 July 1877 (United States)
A general strike halted the movement of U.S. railroads. In the following
days, strike riots spread across the United States. The next week, federal
troops were called out to force an end to the nationwide strike. At the "Battle
of the Viaduct" in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, between protesting
members of the Chicago German Furniture Workers Union, now Local 1784 of the
Carpenters Union, and federal troops (recently returned from an Indian massacre)
killed 30 workers and wounded over 100.
[edit] 1880s
5 September 1882 (United States)
Thirty thousand workers marched in the first Labor Day parade in New York
City.
1883 (Canada)
The Trades and Labour Congress of Canada (TLC), a Canada-wide central
federation of trade unions was formed.
1884 (United States)
The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, forerunner of the
American Federation of Labor, passed a resolution stating that "8 hours shall
constitute a legal day's work from and after May 1, 1886."
March 1886 (United States)
The Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886 was a labor union strike against
the Union Pacific and Missouri Pacific railroads involving more than 200,000
workers.
1 May 1886 (United States)
Workers protested in the streets to demand the universal adoption of the
eight hour day. Hundreds of thousands of American workers had joined the Knights
of Labor.
1 May 1886 (United States)
Bay View Tragedy -- About 2,000 Polish workers walked off their jobs and
gathered at St. Stanislaus Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, angrily denouncing
the ten hour workday. The protesters marched through the city, calling on other
workers to join them. All but one factory was closed down as sixteen thousand
protesters gathered at Rolling Mills. Wisconsin Governor Jeremiah Rusk called
the state militia. The militia camped out at the mill while workers slept in
nearby fields. On the morning of May 5th, as protesters chanted for the eight
hour workday, General Treaumer ordered his men to shoot into the crowd, some of
whom were carrying sticks, bricks, and scythes, leaving seven dead at the scene,
including a child.[2][3]
The Milwaukee Journal reported that eight more would die within twenty-four
hours, adding that Governor Rusk was to be commended for his quick action in the
matter.
4 May 1886 (United States)
The Haymarket Riot, in Chicago, Illinois, is the origin of international May
Day observances.
4 October 1887 (United States)
The Louisiana Militia, aided by bands of "prominent citizens," shot 35
unarmed black sugar workers striking to gain a dollar-per-day wage, and lynched
two strike leaders.
June 1888 (United Kingdom)
The London matchgirls strike of 1888 was a strike of the women and teenage
girls working at the Bryant and May Factory in Bow, London. The strike was
prompted by the poor working conditions in the match factory, including fourteen
hour work days, poor pay, excessive fines, and the severe health complications
of working with yellow (or white) phosphorus, such as phossy jaw.
[edit] 1890s
25 July 1890 (United States)
New York garment workers won the right to unionize after a seven-month
strike. They secured agreements for a closed shop, and firing of all scabs.
6 July 1892 (United States)
Homestead Strike -- Pinkerton Guards, trying to pave the way for the
introduction of scabs, opened fire on striking Carnegie mill steel-workers in
Homestead, Pennsylvania. In the ensuing battle, three Pinkertons surrendered;
then, unarmed, they were set upon and beaten by a mob of townspeople, most of
them women. Seven guards and eleven strikers and spectators were shot to
death.[4]
11 July 1892 (United States)
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho labor strike of 1892 -- Striking miners in Coeur
D'Alene, Idaho dynamited the Frisco Mill, leaving it in ruins.
1894 (United Kingdom)
History of Trade Unionism, the influential book by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
is first published.
7 February 1894 (United States)
In Cripple Creek, Colorado, miners went on strike when mine owners announced
an increase from eight to ten hours per day, with no increase in wages. This
strike marked perhaps the only time in American history that a state militia was
called out to protect miners from sheriff's deputies.
11 May - 10 July 1894 (United States)
Pullman Strike -- A nation-wide strike against the Pullman Company begins
with a wildcat walkout on 11 May after wages are drastically reduced. On 5 July,
the 1892 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago's Jackson Park was set ablaze,
and seven buildings were burned to the ground. The mobs raged on, burning and
looting railroad cars and fighting police in the streets, until 10 July, when
14,000 federal and state troops finally succeeded in putting down the strike,
killing 34 American Railway Union members. Leaders of the strike, including
Eugene Debs, were imprisoned for violating injunctions, causing disintegration
of the union.[4]
1895 (France)
The Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), was formed. This French union
is the oldest confederation still in existence.
21 September 1896 (United States)
The state militia was sent to Leadville, Colorado to break a miner's strike.
10 September 1897 (United States)
Lattimer Massacre -- 19 unarmed striking coal miners and mine workers were
killed and 36 wounded by a posse organized by the Luzerne County sheriff for
refusing to disperse near Hazleton, Pennsylvania. The strikers, most of whom
were shot in the back, were originally brought in as strike-breakers, but later
organized themselves.
1898 (United States)
A portion of the Erdman Act, which would have made it a criminal offense for
railroads to dismiss employees or discriminate against prospective employees
based on their union activities, was declared invalid by the United States
Supreme Court.
1899 (United States)
Miners in Idaho dynamite a mill in retaliation for the Bunker Hill Mining
Company firing 17 union members.
[edit] 1900s
12 October 1902 (United States)
The Anthracite Coal Strike -- Fourteen miners were killed and 22 wounded by
scabherders at Pana, Illinois.[2] The miner get to raise their wages 10% higher
and 9-hour day.
23 November 1903 (United States)
Colorado Labor Wars -- Troops were dispatched to Cripple Creek, Colorado to
defeat a strike by the Western Federation of Miners, with the specific purpose
of driving the union out of the district. The strike had begun in the ore mills
earlier in 1903, and then spread to the mines.
July 1903 (United States)
Labor organizer Mary Harris "Mother" Jones leads child workers in demanding
a 55 hour work week.
8 June 1904 (United States)
A battle between the Colorado Militia and striking miners at Dunnville ended
with six union members dead and 15 taken prisoner. Seventy-nine of the strikers
were deported to Kansas two days later.
17 April 1905 (United States)
The Supreme Court held that a maximum hours law for New York bakery workers
was unconstitutional under the due process clause of the 14th amendment.
1908 (United States)
The Erdman Act was further weakened when Section 10 was declared
unconstitutional. This section had made it illegal for railroad employers to
fire employees for being involved in union activities and use "yellow dog"
contracts (see 1898).
22 November 1909 (United States)
The New York shirtwaist strike of 1909 (Uprising of the 20,000). Female
garment workers went on strike in New York; many were arrested. A judge told
those arrested: "You are on strike against God."
[edit] 1910s
October 1, 1910 (United States)
Los Angeles Times building bombing killed twenty people and destroyed the
building. Calling it "the crime of the century," the newspaper's owner Harrison
Gray Otis blamed the bombing on the unions, a charge denied by unionists.
25 December 1910 (United States)
A dynamite bomb destroyed a portion of the Llewellyn Iron works in Los
Angeles, where a bitter strike was in progress. In April 1911 James McNamara and
his brother John McNamara, secretary-treasurer of the International Association
of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, were charged with the two crimes. James
McNamara pleaded guilty to murder and John McNamara pleaded guilty to conspiracy
in the dynamiting of the Llewellyn Iron Works.[3]
1911 (United States)
The Supreme Court in Gompers v. Buck's Stove and Range Co. (221 U.S. 418)
affirmed a lower court order for the AFL to stop interfering with Buck's Stove
and Range Company's business or boycotting its products or distributors.
On June 24, 1912 in the second contempt trial, the defendants (Samuel
Gompers, John Mitchell, and Frank Morrison) were again found guilty and
sentenced to prison. The Supreme Court overturned the convictions because the
new proceedings had not been instituted within the three-year statute of
limitations (233 U.S. 604 1914).[5]
25 March 1911 (United States)
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire -- The Triangle Shirtwaist Company,
occupying the top three floors of a ten-story building in New York City, was
consumed by fire. One hundred and forty-seven people, mostly women and young
girls working in sweatshop conditions, died.
January-March 1912 (United States)
Lawrence textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, often known as the
"Bread and Roses" strike. Dozens of different immigrant communities united under
the leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in a largely
successful strike led to a large extent by women. The strike is credited with
inventing the moving picket line, a tactic devised to keep strikers from being
arrested for loitering.
It also adopted a tactic used before in Europe, but never in the United
States, of sending children to sympathizers in other cities when they could not
be cared for by strike funds. On 24 February, women attempting to put their
children on a train out of town were beaten by police, shocking the
nation.[4][6]
18 April 1912 (United States)
The National Guard was called out against striking West Virginia coal
miners.
7 July 1912 (United States)
Striking members of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers and supporters are
involved in an armed confrontation with the Galloway Lumber Company and
supporters in the Grabow Riot, resulting in four deaths and 40 to 50 wounded.
11 June 1913 (United States)
Police shot three maritime workers (one of whom was killed) who were
striking against the United Fruit Company in New Orleans.
5 January 1914 (United States)
The Ford Motor Company raised its basic wage from $2.40 for a nine hour day
to $5 for an eight hour day.
20 April 1914 (United States)
The "Ludlow Massacre." In an attempt to persuade strikers at Colorado's
Ludlow Mine Field to return to work, company "guards," engaged by John D.
Rockefeller, Jr. and other mine operators and sworn into the State Militia just
for the occasion, attacked a union tent camp with machine guns, then set it
afire. Five men, two women and 12 children died as a result.[4][5]
13 November 1914 (United States)
A Western Federation of Miners strike is crushed by the militia in Butte,
Montana.
19 January 1915 (United States)
World famous labor leader Joe Hill was arrested in Salt Lake City. He was
convicted on trumped up murder charges, and was executed 21 months later despite
worldwide protests and two attempts to intervene by President Woodrow Wilson. In
a letter to Bill Haywood shortly before his death he penned the famous words,
"Don't mourn - organize!"
On this same day, twenty rioting strikers were shot by factory guards at
Roosevelt, New Jersey.
25 January 1915 (United States)
The Supreme Court upholds "yellow dog" contracts, which forbid membership in
labor unions.
22 July 1916 (United States)
A bomb was set off during a "Preparedness Day" parade in San Francisco,
killing 10 and injuring 40 more. Thomas J. Mooney, a labor organizer and Warren
K. Billings, a shoe worker, were convicted, but were both pardoned in 1939.
19 August 1916 (United States)
Strikebreakers hired by the Everett Mills owner Neil Jamison attacked and
beat picketing strikers in Everett, Washington. Local police watched and refused
to intervene, claiming that the waterfront where the incident took place was
Federal land and therefore outside their jurisdiction. (When the picketers
retaliated against the strikebreakers that evening, the local police intervened,
claiming that they had crossed the line of jurisdiction.)
Three days later, twenty-two union men attempted to speak out at a local
crossroads, but each was arrested; arrests and beatings of strikebreakers became
common throughout the following months, and on 30 October vigilantes forced IWW
speakers to run the gauntlet, subjecting them to whipping, tripping kicking, and
impalement against a spiked cattle guard at the end of the gauntlet. In
response, the IWW called for a meeting on 5 November. When the union men
arrived, they were fired on; seven people were killed, 50 were wounded, and an
indeterminate number wound up missing.
7 September 1916 (United States)
Federal employees win the right to receive Worker's Compensation insurance.
5 November 1916 (United States)
The Everett Massacre (also known as Bloody Sunday) was an armed
confrontation between local authorities and members of the Industrial Workers of
the World (IWW) union, commonly called "Wobblies", which took place in Everett,
Washington on Sunday, November 5, 1916. The tragic event marked a time of rising
tensions in Pacific Northwest labor history.
15 March 1917 (United States)
The Supreme Court approved the Eight-Hour Act under the threat of a national
railway strike.
12 July 1917 (United States)
The Bisbee Deportation: After seizing the local Western Union telegraph
office in order to cut off outside communication, several thousand armed
vigilantes forced 1,185 men in Bisbee, Arizona into manure-laden boxcars and
"deported" them to the New Mexico desert. The action was precipitated by a
strike when workers' demands (including improvements to safety and working
conditions at the local copper mines, an end to discrimination against labor
organizations and unequal treatment of foreign and minority workers, and the
institution of a fair wage system) went unmet. The "deportation" was organized
by Sheriff Harry Wheeler. The incident was investigated months later by a
Federal Mediation Commission set up by President Woodrow Wilson; the Commission
found that no federal law applied, and referred the case to the State of
Arizona, which failed to take any action, citing patriotism and support for the
war as justification for the vigilantes' action.
1 August 1917 (United States)
IWW organizer Frank Little was lynched in Butte, Montana.
5 September 1917 (United States)
Federal agents raid the IWW headquarters in 48 cities.
3 June 1918 (United States)
A Federal child labor law, enacted two years earlier, was declared
unconstitutional. A new law was enacted 24 February 1919, but this one too was
declared unconstitutional (on 2 June 1924).
27 July 1918 (Canada)
United Mine Workers organizer Ginger Goodwin was shot by a hired private
policeman outside Cumberland, British Columbia.
1919 (International)
The International Labour Organization (ILO), now a specialized agency of the
United Nations, was formed through the negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles,
and was initially an agency of the League of Nations.
26 August 1919 (United States)
United Mine Worker organizer Fannie Sellins was gunned down by company
guards in Brackenridge, Pennsylvania.
19 September 1919 (United States)
Looting, rioting and sporadic violence broke out in downtown Boston and
South Boston for days after 1,117 Boston policemen declared a work stoppage due
to their thwarted attempts to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor.
Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge put down the strike by calling out the
entire state militia.
22 September 1919 - 8 January 1920 (United States)
The "Great Steel Strike" began. Ultimately, 350,000 steel workers walked off
their jobs to demand union recognition. The AFL Iron and Steel Organizing
Committee called off the strike on 8 January 1920, their goals unmet.[6]
11 November 1919 (United States)
Centralia Massacre -- IWW organizer Wesley Everest was lynched after a
Centralia, Washington IWW hall was attacked by Legionnaires.
22 December 1919 (United States)
Amid a strike for union recognition by 395,000 steelworkers (ultimately
unsuccessful), approximately 250 "anarchists," "communists," and "labor
agitators" were deported to Russia, marking the beginning of the so-called "Red
Scare."
[edit] 1920s
2 January 1920 (United States)
The U.S. Bureau of Investigation began carrying out the nationwide Palmer
Raids.
19 May 1920 (United States)
The Battle of Matewan. Despite efforts by police chief (and former miner)
Sid Hatfield and Mayor Cabel Testerman to protect miners from interference in
their union drive in Matewan, West Virginia, Baldwin-Felts detectives hired by
the local mining company arrived to evict miners and their families from the
Stone Mountain Mine camp. A gun battle ensued, resulting in the deaths of 7
detectives, Mayor Testerman, and 2 miners. The movie Matewan is based on the
event.
Baldwin-Felts detectives assassinated Sid Hatfield 15 months later, sparking
off an armed rebellion of 10,000 West Virginia coal miners at the "Battle of
Blair Mountain," dubbed the "redneck war" and the "the largest insurrection this
country has had since the Civil War." Army troops later intervened against the
striking mineworkers in West Virginia.[7]
22 June 1922 (United States)
Herrin massacre -- Thirty-six people are killed, 21 of them non-union
miners, during a coal-mine strike at Herrin, Illinois.
July 1922 (United States)
Great Railroad Strike of 1922
1 September 1922 (United States)
Federal judge James H. Wilkerson issues a sweeping injunction against
striking, assembling, picketing, and a variety of other union activities, known
as the "Daugherty Injunction."
14 June 1923 (United States)
Maritime strike. A San Pedro, California IWW hall was raided. Several
children were scalded when the hall was demolished.[8][9]
2 June 1924 (United States)
Child Labor Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was proposed. Only 28 of the
necessary 36 states ever ratified it.
1 May 1925 (China)
The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) was officially founded.
With 134 million members it is the largest trade union in the world. However
many, such as the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, maintain the
position that the ACFTU is not an independent trade union organisation.
25 May 1925 (United States)
Two company houses occupied by nonunion coal miners were blown up and
destroyed by labor "racketeers" during a strike against the Glendale Gas and
Coal Company in Wheeling, West Virginia.
11 June 1925 (Canada)
1 coal miner was killed and many injured during a protest as a result of a
major strike at the British Empire Steel and Coal Company (BESCO) in New
Waterford, Nova Scotia. Davis Day was established in the memory of Bill Davis,
the miner who was murdered by company police. The labour dispute resulted in the
deployment of 2,000 soldiers during the largest peacetime deployment of the
Canadian Army for an internal conflict since the Northwest Rebellion of 1885.
1926 (United States)
Textile workers fought with police in Passaic, New Jersey. A year-long
strike ensued.
21 November 1927 (United States)
Picketing coal miners marching under the banner of the Industrial Workers of
the World were massacred in the Columbine mine massacre in the company town of
Serene, Colorado.
1928 (United States)
The Southern textile strikes of 1929 as the prelude to the wider and more
significant strike of the 1930's[10]
1929 (Australia)
The 1929 Timber Workers strike was the first large strike after the onset of
the Great Depression in Australia arising from a new timber industry award that
increased the working week from 44 to 48 hours and reduced wages. A fifteen
month lockout during 1929-1930 of miners on the Northern New South Wales
Coalfields was particularly bitter with police shooting at miners, killing
Norman Brown and seriously injurying many more at the Rothbury Riot.
[edit] 1930s
3 February 1930 (United States)
"Chicagorillas" -- labor racketeers -- shot and killed contractor William
Healy, with whom the Chicago Marble Setters Union had been having difficulties.
14 April 1930 (United States)
Over 100 farm workers were arrested for their unionizing activities in
Imperial Valley, California. Eight were subsequently convicted of "criminal
syndicalism."
4 May 1931 (United States)
Gun-toting vigilantes attack striking miners in Harlan County, Kentucky.
7 March 1932 (United States)
Police kill striking workers at Ford's Dearborn, Michigan plant.
10 October 1933 (United States)
18,000 cotton workers went on strike in Pixley, California. Four were killed
before a pay-hike was finally won.
1934 (United States)
The Electric Auto-Lite Strike. In Toledo, Ohio, two strikers were killed and
over two hundred wounded by National Guardsmen. Some 1,300 National Guard
troops, including included eight rifle companies and three machine gun
companies, were called in to disperse as many as 10,000 strikers and protestors.
May 1934 (United States)
Police stormed striking truck drivers in Minneapolis who were attempting to
prevent truck movement in the market area.
1 September - 22 September 1934 (United States)
A strike in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, part of a national movement to obtain
a minimum wage for textile workers, resulted in the deaths of three workers.
Over 420,000 workers ultimately went on strike.
9 November 1935 (United States)
The Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) was formed to expand
industrial unionism.
11 February 1937 (United States)
General Motors recognizes the United Auto Workers union following a sit-down
strike in Flint, Michigan, that began in December 1936.
Two months later, company guards beat up United Auto Workers leaders at the
River Rouge Plant, in River Rouge, Michigan.
30 May 1937 (United States)
Police kill 10 and wounded 30 during the "Memorial Day Massacre" at the
Republic Steel plant in Chicago.
25 June 1938 (United States)
The Wages and Hours (later Fair Labor Standards) Act is passed, banning
child labor and setting the 40-hour work week. The Act went into effect in
October 1940, and was upheld in the Supreme Court on 3 February 1941.
27 February 1939 (United States)
The Supreme Court rules that sit-down strikes are illegal.
[edit] 1940s
20 June 1941 (United States)
Henry Ford recognizes the UAW.
15 December 1941 (United States)
The AFL pledges that there will be no strikes in defense-related industry
plants for the duration of the war.
28 December 1944 (United States)
President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the Army to seize the executive
offices of Montgomery Ward and Company after the corporation failed to comply
with a National War Labor Board directive regarding union shops.
1946 (United States)
Workers in packinghouses nation-wide went on strike.
1 April 1946 (United States)
A strike by 400,000 mine workers in the U.S. began. U.S. troops seized
railroads and coal mines the following month.
4 October 1946 (United States)
The U.S. Navy seized oil refineries in order to break a 20-state post-war
strike.
20 June 1947 (United States)
The Taft-Hartley Labor Act, curbing strikes, was vetoed by President Truman.
Congress overrode the veto.
20 April 1948 (United States)
Labor leader Walter Reuther was shot and seriously wounded by would-be
assassins.
[edit] 1950s
1950 (International)
The Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise
Convention, 1948, one of the two primary labour conventions of the ILO, came
into force on July 4.
27 August 1950 (United States)
President Truman ordered the U.S. Army to seize all the nation's railroads
to prevent a general strike. The railroads were not returned to their owners
until two years later.
1951 (International)
The Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention, 1949, one of the
two primary labour conventions of the ILO, came into force on July 18.
8 April 1952 (United States)
President Truman ordered the U.S. Army to seize the nation's steel mills to
avert a strike. The act was ruled to be illegal by the Supreme Court on 2 June.
April 1955 (United States)
Textile workers strike of 1955, in both New Bedford and Fall River,
Massachusetts. Strike over a nickel raise was led and negotiated by Union
President Manuel "Manny" Fernandes Jr., who resolved the strike and got the
workers a nickel raise.
5 December 1955 (United States)
The two largest labor organizations in the U.S. merged to form the AFL-CIO,
with a membership estimated at 15 million.
April 1956 (Canada)
The largest Canadian trade union centre, the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC),
was formed.
5 April 1956 (United States)
Columnist Victor Riesel, a crusader against labor racketeers, was blinded in
New York City when a hired assailant threw sulfuric acid in his face.
14 September 1959 (United States)
The Landrum-Griffin Act passes, restricting union activity.
7 November 1959 (United States)
The Taft-Hartley Act is invoked by the Supreme Court to break a steel
strike.
[edit] 1960s
1962 (United States)
President John F Kennedy issues Executive Order 10988 establishing limited
collective bargaining rights for federal employees and widely regarded as the
impetus for the expansion of public sector bargaining rights at state and local
levels in the years to come.
1 April 1963 (United States)
The 1962 New York City newspaper strike, longest newspaper strike in U.S.
history ended. The 9 major newspapers in New York City had ceased publication
over 114 days before.
10 June 1963 (United States)
Congress passes a law mandating equal pay to women.
1968 (France)
May 1968 - What began as a student protest developed into a nationwide general
strike.
[edit] 1970s
5 January 1970 (United States)
Joseph Yablonski, unsuccessful reform candidate to unseat W. A. Boyle as
President of the United Mine Workers, was murdered, along with his wife and
daughter, in their Clarksville, Pennsylvania home by assassins acting on Boyle's
orders. Boyle was later convicted of the killing.
West Virginia miners went on strike the following day in protest.
18 March 1970 (United States)
The first mass work stoppage in the 195-year history of the United States
Post Office Department began with a walkout of letter carriers in Brooklyn and
Manhattan, soon involving 210,000 of the nation's 750,000 postal employees. With
mail service virtually paralyzed in New York, Detroit, and Philadelphia,
President Nixon declared a state of national emergency and assigned military
units to New York City post offices. The stand-off culminated two weeks later.
29 July 1970 (United States)
United Farm Workers forced California grape growers to sign an agreement
after a five-year strike.
1979 (United States)
The film Norma Rae, based on a real life character trying to unionize a
textile mill, is released. It wins an Academy Award for best actress.
[edit] 1980s
September 1980 (Poland)
The trade union Solidarity (Solidarność) is established at the
Gdańsk Shipyard, and originally led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech
Wałęsa. Within the year the government implements martial law in an
attempt to quell nationwide civil unrest and protest.
3 August 1981 (United States)
Federal air traffic controllers began a nationwide strike after their union
rejected the government's final offer for a new contract. Most of the 13,000
striking controllers defied the back-to-work order, and were dismissed by
President Reagan on 5 August.
October 1982 (United States)
A boycott was initiated by the Industrial Association of Machinists (IAM)
against Brown & Sharpe. The National Labor Relations Board later charged Brown &
Sharpe with regressive bargaining, and of entering into negotiations with the
express purpose of not reaching an agreement with the union. (See IAM for more
details.).
1984 (United States)
Hormel meat strike fails. The documentary American Dream chronicles the
strike.
1985 (Vatican City)
The Association of Vatican Lay Workers was formed, but was not recognised by
the Vatican authorities until 1993. It is the sole trade union in Vatican City
and represents the majority of the 3000 employees who work in the city state.
6 October 1986 (United States)
Female flight attendants won an 18-year lawsuit against United Airlines,
which had fired them for getting married. The lawsuit was resolved when a U.S.
district court approved the reinstatement of 475 attendants and $37 million
back-pay settlement for 1,725 flight attendants. (United Airlines, Inc. v.
McDonald, 432 U.S. 385 (1977))[11] [12]
4 April 1989 (Poland)
Round table negotiations between Solidarity and the then-Communist
government result in semi-free parliamentary elections in Poland, a pivotal
moment in fall of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe. Solidarity leader Lech
Wałęsa is elected President in August of that year.
[edit] See also
Sunday, August 2, 2009
EUGENE ROBINSON ON MICHAEL JACKSON
Many performers can impress or delight, but only a few can astonish. Michael Jackson did it twice. The first time was October 1969, when the hit single “I Want You Back” introduced a cherubic 11-year-old boy who sang with unbelievable maturity, soulfulness and swing. The second was March 1983, when the prodigy—now grown tall, thin and angular—moonwalked through an electrifying “Billie Jean,” leaving a national television audience slack-jawed at how effortlessly he defied the laws of physics.
Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.
Jackson’s personal trajectory, though, was excruciating to watch. I’ve never put much stock in the idea that genius always devours those whom it favors. Jackson had flaws and weaknesses, to put it mildly, but so do we all. Money and celebrity make it possible for the rich and famous to succumb to their worst instincts. The blood-sucking parasites who surrounded Jackson all his life made that surrender not just possible but inevitable.
From the beginning—from the moment when Joe and Katherine Jackson decided to mold their children not into a family but into an act—Michael was the meal ticket. No offense to Jackie, Marlon, Tito and Jermaine, but if they had auditioned for Motown’s Berry Gordy Jr. as the “Jackson 4,” he’d have sent them back to Gary, Ind., on the next bus. Michael was the star.
Jackson has said his father used to beat him, perhaps because he was the “golden child.” Joe Jackson has always denied being physically abusive, but in a sense it doesn’t matter. It seems to me that attaching oneself to one’s young son like a leech and denying that boy any semblance of childhood qualifies as abuse.
Michael Jackson once spoke in an interview of working late into the night in a studio across the street from a playground—and crying because he wanted to be playing on the swings and the slide, not singing the same song into a microphone again and again.
On the road, Michael didn’t spend time with boys his own age. He bunked with his older brothers, who were past puberty—and who, quite naturally, had a keen interest in the groupies who would accost them backstage and ask to come up to the room. It’s not a stretch to imagine that Michael might emerge with some confused ideas and feelings about human sexuality.
When Michael set out on his own, he was able to make his own decisions for the first time. But he had had no practice in making decisions, and while the career choices he made were superb—the albums he made at the beginning of his collaboration with über-producer Quincy Jones, “Off the Wall” and “Thriller,” are towering classics—his personal choices were incompetent, unwise and increasingly bizarre.
The worst choice, of course, was the way he frolicked with children at his Neverland Ranch. Jackson was acquitted of child molestation charges, but he also paid a reported eight-figure settlement to the family of one alleged victim. Let me be clear that no childhood trauma would excuse molestation. My question, though, is where were the staff members and the agents and the hangers-on—and the loving family members—who had an inkling that all might not be right at Neverland? Did they choose to look the other way?
I believe Jackson’s story that he suffered from the skin disease vitiligo—though I don’t believe that vitiligo or any other infirmity was the reason for the disfiguring plastic surgery that turned his face into a pale, taut mask. It had to be self-hatred—not necessarily an attempt to make himself “white” but to make himself hideous.
I also believe his story that he became dependent on painkillers while recovering from the accident in which he was badly burned while making a Pepsi commercial. New-age guru and author Deepak Chopra, who considered Jackson a friend for more than 20 years, told CNN Friday that Jackson was a chronic abuser of OxyContin, Demerol and other heavy-duty drugs.
Others were in the house off Sunset Drive where Jackson stopped breathing, including the entertainer’s personal physician. At the time of his death, Jackson was trying to push himself through an arduous rehearsal schedule to prepare for a 50-concert extravaganza in London—50 grueling concerts at 50 years of age. He was weary. He was in pain.
Jackson’s sycophants cared only about keeping the meal ticket happy. Even if only in self-interest, they should have cared more about keeping him alive.Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.
CHRIS HEDGES
The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The pernicious idea that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the freedom to accumulate vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others has collapsed. The conflation of freedom with the free market has been exposed as a sham. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out and people get a taste of Bill Clinton’s draconian welfare reform. And class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance.
Our economic crisis—despite the corporate media circus around the death of Michael Jackson or Gov. Mark Sanford’s marital infidelity or the outfits of Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest incarnation, Brüno—barrels forward. And this crisis will lead to a period of profound political turmoil and change. Those who care about the plight of the working class and the poor must begin to mobilize quickly or we will lose our last opportunity to save our embattled democracy. The most important struggle will be to wrest the organs of communication from corporations that use mass media to demonize movements of social change and empower proto-fascist movements such as the Christian right.
American culture—or cultures, for we once had distinct regional cultures—was systematically destroyed in the 20th century by corporations. These corporations used mass communication, as well as an understanding of the human subconscious, to turn consumption into an inner compulsion. Old values of thrift, regional identity that had its own iconography, aesthetic expression and history, diverse immigrant traditions, self-sufficiency, a press that was decentralized to provide citizens with a voice in their communities were all destroyed to create mass, corporate culture. New desires and habits were implanted by corporate advertisers to replace the old. Individual frustrations and discontents could be solved, corporate culture assured us, through the wonders of consumerism and cultural homogenization. American culture, or cultures, was replaced with junk culture and junk politics. And now, standing on the ash heap, we survey the ruins. The very slogans of advertising and mass culture have become the idiom of common expression, robbing us of the language to make sense of the destruction. We confuse the manufactured commodity culture with American culture.
How do we recover what was lost? How do we reclaim the culture that was destroyed by corporations? How do we fight back now that the consumer culture has fallen into a state of decay? What can we do to reverse the cannibalization of government and the national economy by the corporations?
All periods of profound change occur in a crisis. It was a crisis that brought us the New Deal, now largely dismantled by the corporate state. It was also a crisis that gave the world Adolf Hitler and Slobodan Milosevic. We can go in either direction. Events move at the speed of light when societies and cultural assumptions break down. There are powerful forces, which have no commitment to the open society, ready to seize the moment to snuff out the last vestiges of democratic egalitarianism. Our bankrupt liberalism, which naively believes that Barack Obama is the antidote to our permanent war economy and Wall Street fraud, will either rise from its coma or be rolled over by an organized corporate elite and their right-wing lap dogs. The corporate domination of the airwaves, of most print publications and an increasing number of Internet sites means we will have to search, and search quickly, for alternative forms of communication to thwart the rise of totalitarian capitalism.
Stuart Ewen, whose books “Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture” and “PR: A Social History of Spin” chronicle how corporate propaganda deformed American culture and pushed populism to the margins of American society, argues that we have a fleeting chance to save the country. I fervently hope he is right. He attacks the ideology of “objectivity and balance” that has corrupted news, saying that it falsely evokes the scales of justice. He describes the curriculum at most journalism schools as “poison.”
“ ‘Balance and objectivity’ creates an idea where both sides are balanced,” he said when I spoke to him by phone. “In certain ways it mirrors the two-party system, the notion that if you are going to have a Democrat speak you need to have a Republican speak. It offers the phantom of objectivity. It creates the notion that the universe of discourse is limited to two positions. Issues become black or white. They are not seen as complex with a multitude of factors.”
Ewen argues that the forces for social change—look at any lengthy and turgid human rights report—have forgotten that rhetoric is as important as fact. Corporate and government propaganda, aimed to sway emotions, rarely uses facts to sell its positions. And because progressives have lost the gift of rhetoric, which was once a staple of a university education, because they naively believe in the Enlightenment ideal that facts alone can move people toward justice, they are largely helpless.
“Effective communication requires not simply an understanding of the facts, but how those facts will take place in the public mind,” Ewen said. “When Gustave Le Bon says it is not the facts in and of themselves which make a point but the way in which the facts take place, the way in which they come to attention, he is right.”
The emergence of corporate and government public relations, which drew on the studies of mass psychology by Sigmund Freud and others after World War I, found its bible in Walter Lippmann’s book “Public Opinion,” a manual for the power elite’s shaping of popular sentiments. Lippmann argued that the key to leadership in the modern age would depend on the ability to manipulate “symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas.” The public mind could be mastered, he wrote, through an “intensification of feeling and a degradation of significance.”
These corporate forces, schooled by Woodrow Wilson’s vast Committee for Public Information, which sold World War I to the public, learned how to skillfully mobilize and manipulate the emotional responses of the public. The control of the airwaves and domination through corporate advertising of most publications restricted news to reporting facts, to “objectivity and balance,” while the real power to persuade and dominate a public remained under corporate and governmental control.
Ewen argues that pamphleteering, which played a major role in the 17th and 18th centuries in shaping the public mind, recognized that “the human mind is not left brain or right brain, that it is not divided by reason which is good and emotion which is bad.”
He argues that the forces of social reform, those organs that support a search for truth and self-criticism, have mistakenly shunned emotion and rhetoric because they have been used so powerfully within modern society to disseminate lies and manipulate public opinion. But this refusal to appeal to emotion means “we gave up the ghost and accepted the idea that human beings are these divided selves, binary systems between emotion and reason, and that emotion gets you into trouble and reason is what leads you forward. This is not true.”
The public is bombarded with carefully crafted images meant to confuse propaganda with ideology and knowledge with how we feel. Human rights and labor groups, investigative journalists, consumer watchdog organizations and advocacy agencies have, in the face of this manipulation, inundated the public sphere with reports and facts. But facts alone, Ewen says, make little difference. And as we search for alternative ways to communicate in a time of crisis we must also communicate in new forms. We must appeal to emotion as well as to reason. The power of this appeal to emotion is evidenced in the photographs of Jacob Riis, a New York journalist, who with a team of assistants at the end of the 19th century initiated urban-reform photography. His stark portraits of the filth and squalor of urban slums awakened the conscience of a nation. The photographer Lewis Hine, at the turn of the 20th century, and Walker Evans during the Great Depression did the same thing for the working class, along with writers such as Upton Sinclair and James Agee. It is a recovery of this style, one that turns the abstraction of fact into a human flesh and one that is not afraid of emotion and passion, which will permit us to counter the force of corporate propaganda.
We may know that fossil fuels are destroying our ecosystem. We may be able to cite the statistics. But the oil and natural gas industry continues its flagrant rape of the planet. It is able to do this because of the money it uses to control legislation and a massive advertising campaign that paints the oil and natural gas industry as part of the solution. A group called EnergyTomorrow.org, for example, has been running a series of television ads. One ad features an attractive, middle-aged woman in a black pantsuit—an actor named Brooke Alexander who once worked as the host of “WorldBeat” on CNN and for Fox News. Alexander walks around a blue screen studio that becomes digital renditions of American life. She argues, before each image, that oil and natural gas are critical to providing not only energy needs but health care and jobs.
“It is almost like they are taking the most optimistic visions of what the stimulus package could do and saying this is what the development of oil and natural gas will bring about,” Ewen said. “If you go to the Web site there is a lot of sophisticated stuff you can play around with. As each ad closes you see in the lower right-hand corner in very small letters API, the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying group for ExxonMobil and all the other big oil companies. For the average viewer there is nothing in the ad to indicate this is being produced by the oil industry.”
The modern world, as Kafka predicted, has become a world where the irrational has become rational, where lies become true. And facts alone will be powerless to thwart the mendacity spun out through billions of dollars in corporate advertising, lobbying and control of traditional sources of information. We will have to descend into the world of the forgotten, to write, photograph, paint, sing, act, blog, video and film with anger and honesty that have been blunted by the parameters of traditional journalism. The lines between artists, social activists and journalists have to be erased. These lines diminish the power of reform, justice and an understanding of the truth. And it is for this purpose that these lines are there.
“As a writer part of what you are aiming for is to present things in ways that will resonate with people, which will give voice to feelings and concerns, feelings that may not be fully verbalized,” Ewen said. “You can’t do that simply by providing them with data. One of the major problems of the present is that those structures designed to promote a progressive agenda are antediluvian.”
Corporate ideology, embodied in neoconservatism, has seeped into the attitudes of most self-described liberals. It champions unfettered capitalism and globalization as eternal. This is the classic tactic that power elites use to maintain themselves. The loss of historical memory, which “balanced and objective” journalism promotes, has only contributed to this fantasy. But the fantasy, despite the desperate raiding of taxpayer funds to keep the corporate system alive, is now coming undone. The lie is being exposed. And the corporate state is running scared.
“It is very important for people like us to think about ways to present the issues, whether we are talking about the banking crisis, health care or housing and homelessness,” Ewen said. “We have to think about presenting these issues in ways that are two steps ahead of the media rather than two steps behind. That is not something we should view as an impossible task. It is a very possible task. There is evidence of how possible that task is, especially if you look at the development of the underground press in the 1960s. The underground press, which started cropping up all over the country, was not a marginal phenomenon. It leeched into the society. It developed an approach to news and communication that was 10 steps ahead of the mainstream media. The proof is that even as it declined, so many structures that were innovated by the underground press, things like The Whole Earth Catalogue, began to affect and inform the stylistic presentation of mainstream media.”
“I am not a prophet,” Ewen said. “All I can do is look at historical precedence and figure out the extent we can learn from it. This is not about looking backwards. If you can’t see the past you can’t see the future. If you can’t see the relationship between the present and the past you can’t understand where the present might go. Who controls the past controls the present, who controls the present controls the future, as George Orwell said. This is a succinct explanation of the ways in which power functions.”
“Read ‘The Gettysburg Address,’ ” Ewen said. “Read Frederick Douglass’ autobiography or his newspaper. Read ‘The Communist Manifesto.’ Read Darwin’s ‘Descent of Man.’ All of these things are filled with an understanding that communicating ideas and producing forms of public communication that empower people, rather than disempowering people, relies on an integrated understanding of who the public is and what it might be. We have a lot to learn from the history of rhetoric. We need to think about where we are going. We need to think about what 21st century pamphleteering might be. We need to think about the ways in which the rediscovery of rhetoric—not lying, but rhetoric in its more conventional sense—can affect what we do. We need to look at those historical antecedents where interventions happened that stepped ahead of the news. And to some extent this is happening. We have the freest and most open public sphere since the village square.”
The battle ahead will be fought outside the journalistic mainstream, he said. The old forms of journalism are dying or have sold their soul to corporate manipulation and celebrity culture. We must now wed fact to rhetoric. We must appeal to reason and emotion. We must not be afraid to openly take sides, to speak, photograph or write on behalf of the disempowered. And, Ewen believes, we have a chance in the coming crisis to succeed.
“Pessimism is never useful,” he said. “Realism is useful, understanding the forces that are at play. To quote Antonio Gramsci, ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.’ ”
The American Empire Is Bankrupt-Chris Hedges
This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.
Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.
There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, “the most important meeting of the 21st century so far.”
It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes in the past few weeks will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. The people of this class will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists, from the Christian right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on Fox News, will assure the country they will impose.
I called Hudson, who has an article in Monday’s Financial Times called “The Yekaterinburg Turning Point: De-Dollarization and the Ending of America’s Financial-Military Hegemony.” “Yekaterinburg,” Hudson writes, “may become known not only as the death place of the czars but of the American empire as well.” His article is worth reading, along with John Lanchester’s disturbing exposé of the world’s banking system, titled “It’s Finished,” which appeared in the May 28 issue of the London Review of Books.
“This means the end of the dollar,” Hudson told me. “It means China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran are forming an official financial and military area to get America out of Eurasia. The balance-of-payments deficit is mainly military in nature. Half of America’s discretionary spending is military. The deficit ends up in the hands of foreign banks, central banks. They don’t have any choice but to recycle the money to buy U.S. government debt. The Asian countries have been financing their own military encirclement. They have been forced to accept dollars that have no chance of being repaid. They are paying for America’s military aggression against them. They want to get rid of this.”
China, as Hudson points out, has already struck bilateral trade deals with Brazil and Malaysia to denominate their trade in China’s yuan rather than the dollar, pound or euro. Russia promises to begin trading in the ruble and local currencies. The governor of China’s central bank has openly called for the abandonment of the dollar as reserve currency, suggesting in its place the use of the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights. What the new system will be remains unclear, but the flight from the dollar has clearly begun. The goal, in the words of the Russian president, is to build a “multipolar world order” which will break the economic and, by extension, military domination by the United States. China is frantically spending its dollar reserves to buy factories and property around the globe so it can unload its U.S. currency. This is why Aluminum Corp. of China made so many major concessions in the failed attempt to salvage its $19.5 billion alliance with the Rio Tinto mining concern in Australia. It desperately needs to shed its dollars“China is trying to get rid of all the dollars they can in a trash-for-resource deal,” Hudson said. “They will give the dollars to countries willing to sell off their resources since America refuses to sell any of its high-tech industries, even Unocal, to the yellow peril. It realizes these dollars are going to be worthless pretty quickly.”
The architects of this new global exchange realize that if they break the dollar they also break America’s military domination. Our military spending cannot be sustained without this cycle of heavy borrowing. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion, before we add on things like nuclear research. The next closest national military budget is China’s, at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.
There are three categories of the balance-of-payment deficits. America imports more than it exports. This is trade. Wall Street and American corporations buy up foreign companies. This is capital movement. The third and most important balance-of-payment deficit for the past 50 years has been Pentagon spending abroad. It is primarily military spending that has been responsible for the balance-of-payments deficit for the last five decades. Look at table five in the Balance of Payments Report, published in the Survey of Current Business quarterly, and check under military spending. There you can see the deficit.
To fund our permanent war economy, we have been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States then the exchange rate against the dollar will go up. This will penalize exporters. This has allowed America to print money without restraint to buy imports and foreign companies, fund our military expansion and ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy our treasury bonds. This cycle appears now to be over. Once the dollar cannot flood central banks and no one buys our treasury bonds, our empire collapses. The profligate spending on the military, some $1 trillion when everything is counted, will be unsustainable.
“We will have to finance our own military spending,” Hudson warned, “and the only way to do this will be to sharply cut back wage rates. The class war is back in business. Wall Street understands that. This is why it had Bush and Obama give it $10 trillion in a huge rip-off so it can have enough money to survive.”
The desperate effort to borrow our way out of financial collapse has promoted a level of state intervention unseen since World War II. It has also led us into uncharted territory.
“We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system,” Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books. “There is no model or precedent for this, and no way to argue that it’s all right really, because under such-and-such a model of capitalism ... there is no such model. It isn’t supposed to work like this, and there is no road-map for what’s happened.”
The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities—think Enron—for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
All the Answers You'll Ever Need-fred reed
Last night Vi and I watched for the first time a documentary, (Carry It On) shot by my friend Jim Coyne, on Joan Baez and the movement against a war no one any longer remembers, far away, on another planet. It was lovely filmwork. Jim is a genius. I may have to stop having friends. I feel inferior to all of them. It gets depressing.
Of no interest to anyone but me, perhaps, it completely changed my understanding of Baez, whom I had regarded for forty years as just another pretty voice. No. Smart, tough, principled in a world that isn’t. I hereby apologize.
In that war—I forget what planet it was on—the freaks and professors and mothers and the simply decent finally managed stop the carnage, though only after the Pentagon had killed 60,000 American kids and a million or so Vietnamese, not to mention devastating Laos and bringing Pol Pot to power. God I’m proud. We’re such a force for democracy.
When the GIs left Asia in ’73, the commie peaceniks thought they had won. And they had, for ten minutes. The grip of the military on the country loosened briefly.
Unfortunately the soldiers learned. Not how to win wars, which they do poorly if at all, but how to keep a war going. Winning a war isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The promotions and contracts stop. When you are paid to do something, it is in your interest not to finish doing it.
The Pentagon’s first lesson learned was to avoid conscription, as the conscripted and their families will take to the streets. By using an army of volunteer suckers about whom nobody of importance cares, the military severs its wars from most of the country, which loses interest. The brass are then free to do as they choose.
The second lesson learned was that while defeating the enemy is not necessary, and perhaps not desirable, controlling the press is everything. And they did it.
So forty or so years after all the love-ins, the marches, the righteous dope (all of which may seem silly, but in my view preferable to watching a Cambodian mother screaming over the opened bleeding guts of her child) the Pentagon is at it again. Once more the jets howl over remote primitive countries, countries that did nothing to the US and couldn’t have, and promotions flow, and contracts, and generals demand more troops and more money to stop communism. Excuse me, terrorism. Soon, the Chinese, a better threat, coming to a theater near you. With the passing of years, one demon fades into another. Switching enemies is much easier now, what with search-and-replace.
But it’s all about democracy and freedom and patriotism and Saving America from…from something. The hoopla changes little, and how well it works. Patriotic friends sometimes say to me of the military ardent things like, “When your country says go, you go!” I seldom point out that no one in their families is in the slightest danger of having to go, nor that “the country” is recruiting hard and they aren’t urging their children to enlist; nor do I ask, “What is your attitude toward having your daughter drafted onto the streets of Baghdad for five tours, perhaps coming back drooling and gurbling for life after having her brains scrambled by a roadside bomb?” Patriotism is important to patriots. They are full of it, and I’m about a quart low. I shut up. I don’t want to lose friends.
Yet…I think I must be a communist. It seems to me that when your country says “go,” you should ask, “Why?” Do you have a reason to kill whoever you are being sent to kill? Then go. Otherwise, don’t. If I told you to go to Ottawa and kill Canadians, you would think me mad, and think it correctly. Why then should you obediently kill them because a politician in Washington tells you to do it? I do not understand.
And of course “your country” doesn’t tell you anything at all. Countries are abstractions. Men tell you to go, and for their own purposes: Dick Cheney or George Bush, Nixon or Nitze, or the men who run the petroleum industry, or people in the Israeli lobby, or men in the military companies who want contracts, or officers who want to give war a try.
Why are these people “my country”? And why isn’t Joan Baez my country instead of David Petraeus? I will choose who is my country, thank you. Ledbelly, Benny Goodman, Carl Perkins and Miss Emily Anne will come before Lemay, McNamara, Lyndon Johnson, and Obama. Long before.
Soldiers talk much of honor. I do not understand how military service can possibly be thought honorable. If the Wehrmacht were landing in North Carolina, yes, but I do not believe that it is. Where is the honor in bombing from the air lightly armed peasants who can’t fight back? It is cowardly, yes, and obscene, but do not talk of honor. Murder for hire is murder for hire.
We now have men who sit at screens, drinking coffee and firing missiles from remote robotic aircraft at people on the ground whom they cannot identify. Brave men, they. I could burst into a kindergarten and kill the children with a ball bat. The one is as honorable as the other.
Recently I saw on television a black sergeant in Afghanistan, probably chosen by his commander for photogenicity, standing in front of a tank or mobile gun, I forget which. He said something scripted like “This is a such-and-such unit, the most powerful fighting force in the world.” This sort of ritual cockiness is carefully ingrained. Near my barracks in Parris Island was a sign, “The most dangerous thing in the world is a Marine rifleman.” If it had said “an ambitious colonel” it would have come closer to truth.
But one may wonder (unless one already knows) how good the Pentagon’s military really is. A pissed-off peasant with an RPG would seem on the evidence more effective than the pricey zoom-kapows arrayed against him.
I cannot endorse the politics of the Taliban. If one of them told me that my daughter couldn’t go to school, one of us would leave the room on a stretcher. Yet as fighting men, are they not magnificent? They have only rifles, explosives, RPGs, and balls. Their enemies have unlimited air support, helicopters, armor, artillery, sophisticated communications, night-vision gear, good food and excellent medical care. The Taliban take heavy casualties, their enemies almost none. The ragheads do not even have PX privileges. Yet they have not been defeated. A fight on even terms would last perhaps five minutes.
This, for a trillion dollars.
What the hell. Plus ca change, plus ca doesn’t. Next year in Beijing. Tell you what, though. I never liked Kum Ba Yah, and “We Shall Overcome” is probably the sappiest song every written. But those people had nothing to be ashamed of.
On a pleasanter note: I have decided to become a famous song-writer and make millions. The following is a beginning, copyright Fred Reed, all rights reserved. Major recording studios can send large checks.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
CALIFORNIA THE EXAMPLE OF FAILED GOVERNMENT POLICY
All sorts of startling conclusions are being drawn about the failure of California’s ballot funding initiatives last week. Newt Gingrich hailed it as another Boston Tea Party, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman insisted that it condemns California, one of the world’s largest economies, to banana republic status. But if it was such a big deal, how come the voter turnout was so low?
Maybe because the statewide ballot initiatives were a bit of a political practical joke played by a Republican governor and leading Democrats pretending to be dealing on a statewide basis with the consequences of a national economic crisis that can be solved only through massive federal intervention. There is no way that the people of any state will vote to increase their taxes in the midst of a deep recession, and certainly not when the funding demands seem to have little to do with solving the problem at hand. As a subheading in the ever-sober Economist magazine put it, “Voters reject a ballot they could not comprehend.”
I tried, and after reading the opposing argument in the literature supplied at my nearly empty polling station I voted for the ballot propositions that our governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, had requested. I assumed that this would help our vastly underfunded inner-city schools. Later, my son Chris, who teaches in one of those schools, told me that I might have been wrong and that the convoluted paragraphs of the all too typically obtuse California propositions could not improve matters much at all.
So, filled with doubt and guilt, I took solace in the fact that in terms of the money involved it wasn’t that big a deal, and that surely the feds, to whom we Californians send more in revenue than any other state, would bail us out as they have the banks. Heck, the entire projected California budget shortfall comes to only $21 billion, a tiny fraction of the banking bailout. Yes, only—what is $21 billion in federal loan guarantees for California to skirt bankruptcy compared with the $45 billion given to Citigroup, along with $300 billion more in guarantees for that company’s toxic paper? Or how about the $185 billion doled out to AIG? If Citigroup is too big to fail, isn’t the state of California? Does anyone seriously believe that the national economy can snap back to health if California is in the dump?
The cause of California’s, and almost every other state’s, predicament is an economy ruined by deregulation policies that were secured by the lobbying efforts of Wall Street, led most prominently by Citigroup. So, I expected a federal government that has spent trillions salvaging the banks that got us into this mess to find the relatively minor sums needed to bail out California and other states that have been the victims of Wall Street’s dangerous games.
But I didn’t count on the tough-love steeliness of President Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod, who told Californians that “there’s a limit to what the government can do” when it comes to bailing out our state (as opposed to the banks). Or of White House press secretary Robert Gibbs: “Obviously, the state has to make some very tough fiscal decisions … [given] the budgetary constraints that they have.”
Tough for whom? Not the politicians of either party. The results of such decisions are tough for the poor of America, two-thirds of whom are kids, left to the tender mercy of the states, thanks to the sweeping “welfare reform” and other programs put into place by the Clinton White House in one of that Democratic administration’s signature triangulation ploys.
The Los Angeles Times summarized the direction of those difficult choices in a story headlined “Poor would be hard hit by proposed California budget cuts,” which stated that Schwarzenegger “is considering a plan to slash California’s safety net for the poor by eliminating the state’s main welfare program, health insurance for low-income families and cash grants to college students.”
Bail out the banks, but not the 500,000 poor families with children served by the CalWorks program, which will be dismantled, or the 928,000 children covered by the Healthy Families program, slated for oblivion.
At a time when the feds are spending with such abandon in an effort to stimulate the economy, why is it tolerable to leave states in a position where they are forced to fire teachers? As the Los Angeles Times reported: “Schwarzenegger has proposed slashing state spending on education by $3 billion to help close the budget gap, and the state would pay dearly for canceling classes, firing instructors, cutting class days and shortening the school year, experts said.” How can there be federal funds readily available for banker bonuses but not to keep teachers in the classroom with their students? It must have been the kids who caused the meltdown.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
OPERATOR CHRIS HANEN WRITES TO JOSEPH ROSE
http://blog.oregonlive.com/commuting/2009/07/dispatch_from_the_commute_a_tr.html#more
Dispatch from the commute: A TriMet driver's got something to say
Posted by Joseph Rose, The Orgeonian July 16, 2009 08:23AM
Today, out of fairness and a desire to once again show that I'm not out to kick around TriMet drivers, we offer up a dispatch from behind the big, stressful wheel of a bus.
First, some context. Two weeks ago, I wrote about an
TriMet seemed to side with the rider, saying it was a perfect example of how a little give by bus drivers might go a long way toward helping the agency's reputation as it moves forward with unpopular cutbacks.
As you can imagine, the story wasn't popular with operators, many of whom wrote and called to accuse me of writing a "hit" piece. The mother of a driver even left a phone message, demanding that I do another story about how her son and his transit compatriots are under so much pressure to keep their route schedules they skip bathroom breaks.
Then there was operator Chris Hanen, who wrote me a letter, encouraging me to ask "What causes the drivers to be rude?" Well, here it is in its entirety:
Dear Mr. Rose
As a TriMet driver of over 16 years. I found the story you wrote about rude drivers a little biased. You reported the effect but what you should have asked yourself is, "What causes the drivers to be rude?"
We all have bad days but that is not what is going on here. Drivers are not given enough time to use the restroom, eat a snack, have a cup of coffee or just have a few minutes to themselves before having to turn the bus around and do it all again.
Stressed drivers don't provide very good customer service. The difference in bus lines is drastic. Some lines have ample time which will have no complaints while other lines like the 33 for example will have more complaints. I used to enjoy my job a lot more than I do now.
A passenger who has been riding the system for many years said to me, "I never see the bus drivers smile much any more like they used to." That should tell you a lot. With the new cuts in service, it's not going to get any better.
TriMet saves a lot of money by cutting break time from runs. Lots of blue shirts are not happy about the way management has chopped time from the runs the past 7 years. Saving money makes Fred (Hansen) look good though. And all his new trains that go where buses used to. Do you think WES service will be cut? It's costing a lot to serve only a few.
Trains are not a bad thing but too much too fast doesn't serve the public as a whole. Low ridership runs don't even have a chance anymore. Buses feed the trains not the other way around. We have been expanding train service at the expense of bus sevice.
He signed off as "Nice Driver. Almost all the time!"
Bottom line: This year's service cutbacks aren't easy on the operators either.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I'm not on a crusade to make the hard-working -- and often under-appreciated -- army of TriMet operators look bad. Despite what that note attached to a clipping of one of my Oregonian columns on break-room wall says (yes, I know about it), I'm also not in cahoots with TriMet administrators to force concessions in a contract year.
One, I didn't even know negotiations were going on. And TriMet managers also have plenty of issues with what I write.
Don't believe me? Just ask Al Margulies, who drives the endangered No. 67 in
Recently, Margulies challenged me to ride his route with him. I did. We talked. He gained a better understanding of the watchdog role of every journalist, and I stepped off his bus with a greater appreciation of what operators face on the road.
The offer is out there for any driver. Ask and I'll ride with you.
Of course, for the sake of full disclosure, there have been times when I've been an anonymous rider and witnessed behavior that made me wonder why the drivers behind the wheel chose their profession.
On one ride, I held on tightly as an operator seemed to be on a mission to blow through every red light downtown. And I'll never forget the driver who jumped out of his seat at a stop, glared at his passengers and shouted, "Whoever's got their earphones blaring that music better turn it down or you're off at the next stop!"
I looked around and realized I was the only one listening to music. Another rider, obviously in shock, looked at me and said, "I think he's talking to you."
Weird. First, the "headphones" were actually those tiny iPod earbuds. Second, the volume was low enough that I had no trouble hearing the driver. Also, it was hardly skull-shattering hip-hop or hard rock.
I was listening to Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain."
The driver must have been a Coltrane fan.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Wendell Potter is the health insurance industry’s worst nightmare
Wendell Potter is the health insurance industry’s worst nightmare. He’s a whistle-blower. Potter, the former chief spokesperson for insurance giant CIGNA, recently testified before Congress, “I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick—all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors.”
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Potter was deeply involved in CIGNA and industrywide strategies for maintaining their profitable grip on U.S. health care. He told me: “The thing they fear most is a single-payer plan. They fear even the public insurance option being proposed; they’ll pull out all the stops they can to defeat that to try to scare people into thinking that embracing a public health insurance option would lead down the slippery slope toward socialism ... putting a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor. They’ve used those talking points for years, and they’ve always worked.”
In 2007, CIGNA denied a California teenager, Nataline Sarkisyan, coverage for a liver transplant. Her family went to the media. The California Nurses Association joined in. Under mounting pressure, CIGNA finally granted coverage for the procedure. But it was too late. Two hours later, Nataline died.
While visiting family in Tennessee, Potter stopped at a “medical expedition” in Wise, Va. People drove hours for free care from temporary clinics set up in animal stalls at the local fairground. Potter told me that weeks later, flying on a CIGNA corporate jet with the CEO: “I realized that someone’s premiums were helping me to travel that way ... paying for my lunch on gold-trimmed china. I thought about those men and women I had seen in Wise County ... not having any idea [how] insurance executives lived.” He decided he couldn’t be an industry PR hack anymore.
Insurance executives and their Wall Street investors are addicted to massive profits and double-digit annual rate increases. To squeeze more profit, Potter says, if a person makes a major claim for coverage, the insurer will often scrutinize the person’s original application, looking for any error that would allow it to cancel the policy. Likewise, if a small company’s employees make too many claims, the insurer, Potter says, “very likely will jack up the rates so much that your employer has no alternative but to leave you and your co-workers without insurance.”
This week, as the House and Senate introduce their health care bills, Potter warns, “One thing to remember is that the health insurance industry has been anticipating this debate on health care for many years ... they’ve been positioning themselves to get very close to influential members of Congress in both parties.” Montana Sen. Max Baucus chairs the Senate Finance Committee, key for health care reform. Potter went on, “[T]he insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry and others in health care have donated ... millions of dollars to his campaigns over the past few years. But aside from money, it’s relationships that count ... the insurance industry has hired scores and scores of lobbyists, many of whom have worked for members of Congress, and some who are former members of Congress.”
The insurance industry and other health care interests are lobbying hard against a government-sponsored, nonprofit, public health insurance option, and are spending, according to The Washington Post, up to $1.4 million per day to sway Congress and public opinion.
Don’t be fooled. Profit-driven insurance claim denials actually kill people, and Wendell Potter knows where the bodies are buried. His whistle-blowing may be just what’s needed to dump what’s sick in our health care system.Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
PALIN AND FRANKEN, 2 SIDES OF AMERICAN POLITICS
By Joe Conason
The new senator from Minnesota is a comedian, writer and actor who lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and raised a lot of money from friends in Hollywood. The departing governor of Alaska is a hockey mom from a small backwoods town who likes to hunt and fish. Yet today, Al Franken looks wholesomely mainstream, while Sarah Palin seems headed for the tabloid fringe.
That unexpected contrast reveals much about the current configuration of Republicans, Democrats and politics in America—a story of two parties that crossed paths while traveling in opposite directions over the past dozen years or so.
Before he entered politics, Franken had a long and highly successful career in television, wielding a sense of humor that could be wicked, outrageous and even offensive. He was an urban denizen with liberal sensibilities who counted professional wrestlers, college professors, scruffy journalists (including this one) and members of the Grateful Dead among his friends. Even after he signed on as the star host of the progressive Air America radio network, he was primarily an entertainer.
Back around the time that Franken quit “Saturday Night Live” for the second time, Sarah Palin entered public life as a civic activist and candidate for local office in Wasilla, Alaska, where she was soon elected mayor. She was a populist of the right-wing variety, a fundamentalist churchgoer and a scourge of politics-as-usual. Concerning herself with such conservative staples as government spending, tax cuts, term limits and gun rights, she was a textbook Republican officeholder.
But somewhere along the line, everything changed for both them and their parties. Franken left showbiz behind to prove himself a serious policy wonk as well as a devoted family man; Palin transformed herself and her family into a reality television show.
The entertainer became a public servant—and the public servant became entertainment.
How this all came to pass is a complicated story that actually begins long before the political decisions that led to his rise and her fall. The bookish, wise-guy Al always had a political streak dating back to his college years at Harvard, where he switched from mathematics to political science and graduated with honors. The telegenic, athletic “Sarah Barracuda” embarked on a career as a TV sportscaster in Alaska’s biggest city before eloping with Todd and moving home to Wasilla.
The reversal of the parties’ trajectories, in style and substance, may have begun during the 2002 election, a stunning midterm defeat for the Democratic opposition that Republican strategist Karl Rove predicted to be the start of decades of unchallenged rule for GOP conservatism. That was also the moment when Paul Wellstone, the Democratic senator from Minnesota who had become a national icon of progressive politics, died in a terrible plane crash along with his wife, Sheila, his daughter Marcia and three aides, as he was campaigning for re-election.
In the bitter aftermath of his death, turncoat Democrat Norm Coleman won a special election to succeed Wellstone, and joined the Republican majority in the Senate. And Franken, a Minnesota native, began to think about whether he might someday run for that same seat to vindicate the legacy of Wellstone, one of his closest friends.
In victory, the Republicans grew increasingly extreme and overconfident, encouraging figures such as Palin to follow their most extreme instincts. In defeat, the Democrats at last began to refurbish their progressive ideology, reconnect with working American families and rediscover their will to fight.
As an author and radio personality, Franken made a significant contribution to his party’s renewal. He was ready for prime-time politics in ways that Palin, the sudden star who could barely utter a coherent paragraph, was not.
Beneath the glittering surface, she exhibited profound weakness. Behind the joking persona, he showed moral and intellectual strength.
Joe Conason writes for The New York Observer.
CITIZENS ABOUT TO RAMPAGE?
By Marie Cocco
When a virulent disease is ravaging you like a cancer, you don’t want a cacophony of voices promoting different or contradictory cures. Yet that is what we’re starting to hear about the economic crisis, not only from a politically divided—and pretty scared—capital, but from within the Obama administration itself.
In just the past few days, Vice President Joe Biden has said the young administration misread the depth of the recession—an honest account, since most private economists did as well. Laura Tyson, an outside economic adviser to the White House, said it’s wise to start preparing another stimulus package.
Then President Barack Obama made everything perfectly muddy when he said in an ABC News interview that the seriousness of the downturn and how to attack it is “something we wrestle with constantly.” Yet in the next breath, he expressed concern about the burgeoning deficit.
But if anyone’s looking for some clear voices, there are 650,000 of them just waiting to be heard. That is roughly the number of long-term unemployed who will begin losing their jobless benefits in September, according to the National Employment Law Project.
Remember, the recession didn’t start last fall when the government bailed out AIG and the financial system froze. It began in December 2007—and 6.5 million jobs have been lost since then. Depending on which state and the sort of triggers that apply to benefits, hundreds of thousands of workers laid off early in the downturn are soon to be left without the basic sustenance of an unemployment check.
Meanwhile, the Labor Department says, the number of unemployed people out of work for 27 weeks or longer continues to grow, reaching 4.4 million last month. In June, three out of 10 jobless workers had been out of work for at least six months, according to the department’s data.
The stimulus package the president signed soon after taking office did provide extended benefits, and boosted weekly payments. But even that extension runs out on Dec. 26, and would not apply to all the unemployed. Does anyone really believe that a significant portion of the unemployed will have found new work by then? Hardly. Both private and government economists now predict that unemployment will continue to rise at least through the end of this year.
“We can’t ignore this moment when all these folks are running out [of benefits],” says Maurice Emsellem of the National Employment Law Project. “That needs to be a top priority, to help these workers.”
Let’s stop kidding ourselves. In no contemporary economic crisis—not even those that unfolded on the Republicans’ watch—has Congress left the unemployed completely in the lurch. So some sort of spending package—call it stimulus, call it stopgap emergency aid, whatever works—is going to have to be passed.
The unemployment emergency helps feed another crisis Congress is going to be forced to address: the state budget disasters unfolding around the country. So far, 42 states have cut budgets that already had been enacted for fiscal 2009, according to the National Governors Association. More and deeper cuts are expected next year.
Already states have laid off and furloughed workers—including, in some states, the very workers who process unemployment claims. Generally speaking, states are required to balance their budgets each year, a mandate that forces them to pull money out of the economy through spending reductions and tax hikes, counteracting the federal government’s efforts to juice things up. “That is what happened during the Great Depression, we had states working against what the federal government was doing,” says Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute.
With red states and blue, Republican governors and Democrats, all struggling against the same relentless, recession-driven drops in tax revenue, an almost irresistible political coalition for more aid to states eventually will take shape. And with the fast-approaching September deadline for extending some unemployment benefits, there will probably emerge one of those must-pass measures that may or may not be called another stimulus bill.
Any hot air expended trying to stop it serves no purpose but to fuel political fires. Remember, that is the whole point of those now huffing and puffing most heartily. They don’t want to figure a way out of this morass; they just want to figure out a way to unseat those now in office.
Marie Cocco’s e-mail address is mariecocco(at)washpost.com.
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