Actually what’s complicated is the trickery involved. The unemployment rate that we have delivered to us from the usual outlets/suspects is not the same creature it was prior to 1994. Back then, people who flat gave up looking for work were still counted in the numbers. Now they are invisible. The carefully titrated rate also doesn’t include the underemployed—individuals who perhaps want to work full-time but aren’t provided with that option. As individuals fall off the rolls they fall into a void. Our single digit unemployment rate is actually around 22% if measured in the pre-1994 reality-based math. If you aren’t already aware of the site, shadowstats.com does a marvelous job exhibiting the gritty truth.

I think if you try to follow what I’m saying, you’ll realize that by subtracting the permanently discouraged job seeker, and ignoring the partially employed poverty level toilers, you’ll realize the only uptick in job growth was in oiled up slave boys for Madonna’s half-time show. I was embarrassed to know that, but it doesn’t stop me from bringing you the facts because I care. Sadly by the time the vo-tech greased up slave boy programs graduate their newly inflated classes (excited about the potential jobs)– most benefit to cost ratios will be gone due to the glut in the market. It’s all glamorous until you’re forced to take the 14 hour a week job cleaning pools with a god damn gold plated codpiece (that rusts — it’s not real gold). You’re there dragging the skimmer as you wonder how you’ll pay that 94,000 to Sallie Mae.

But perhaps you will look for a sympathetic ear from your president. President Obamney (really, like it matters which one wins if you opt for one of those clowns. Let’s just call ‘em Obamney). If you tell him your sad tale, he might say “interesting” in regard to your plight. That’s what happened when the current president fielded questions from the populace the other night. Jennifer Wedel was gauche enough to ask the president why H1-B visas were still being provided for foreign workers in areas such as engineering, when citizens like her husband (a semi-conductor engineer) could not find work. As you may have heard, Obama found that to be “interesting”.  He was under the assumption that job growth was a’booming in those areas. He really used that bland word in response to the woman’s question.

What I find “interesting” is that with the overall colossal increase in worker productivity over the last several decades, the time needed to be invested in work—that is, to obtain food and shelter, has not reflected any benefit to the more productive employees. Hell, shouldn’t a person be able to work 20 hours a week with those advances –with available employment for all those who desire it? No. Of course not. Because all of the advances and toil has only equaled a boon for the very top. The extra money freed up has only trickled upward.

Believe it or not, Kellogg cereal company implemented a 30 hour work week back in 1930. By many accounts, individuals enjoyed the increase in time with their family and became more involved in the community. But that was 1930. This is 2012.  Of course, things should get worse all the time! Well, that 30 hour per week notion was erased by World War 2 and the subsequent frenzied boom years. But it’s amazing that this is such a buried experiment in the annals of labor. It’s been treated as something of a natural law, akin to gravity, that workers are to become more productive, but never are given the reward of less work. The hamster wheel turns faster and faster. We all know people who work a couple of jobs, sometimes by necessity, sometimes not. You have to wonder about the deathbed realizations that entire swaths of real living weren’t achieved, but 60 hour workweeks were.

I’m pretty certain that Obama does find it “interesting” that unemployment is rife even in the engineering field. It seems highly unlikely that this is an accident. Just as it is with lower skilled jobs, an influx of foreign labor serves to create a downward pressure on wages. We now have a terrified workforce, one that will largely not complain, and will tolerate increasing loads because “at least we have a job”. I would bet this is why something akin to the Depression era WPA hasn’t been created. It certainly doesn’t seem to be due to fiscal responsibility.

We bleed money on foreign soil, losing funds and ethics as the military-industrial complex adds rolls of fat. Frenzied spending still goes on even with superficial “cuts” to defense. The cuts that do seem to keep coming with regularity and depth are the ones that hit social safety nets. Those serve to enhance the fear in the populace.  The workers become more docile and horrified of unemployment. A WPA program would exert pressure in the opposite direction and we can’t have that. It’s all very…..interesting.

But here’s to hoping…hoping at some point there’s a realization that people are more than cogs of production to be manipulated by fear and social Darwinism. And we are all guilty of viewing people as a subset of their occupation — that’s kind of been the American way. There is that omnipresent question “what do you do?” As if that’s the core defining feature of a human. With rampant unemployment, perhaps those boundaries will blur. That along with a person’s worth being measured in ever increasing “productivity”– with the casting off of those ragged, unemployed outliers. people that they don’t even bother counting any longer.

But for now, the gluttonous use of natural resources extends to what they consider the aptly named human resources. It’s a short sighted, soulless plunder that has to stop. And I’m sure at some point it will.

O yea, we grew restive and dissatisfied with the blessings — however meager — which thou had bestowed on our sorry, ungrateful selves.  We sowed discontent among the people, calling for a Living Wage and a union contract.  Yet, O wise and forgiving Job-Creator, we now beg your indulgence of our childish ingratitude!  Should you, in your magnificent Plan, choose to restore to us the bounty of our former Jobs, we shall strive most humbly to prove worthy, this time, of the infinite beneficence of our utmost, all-knowing Lord and Master.

In our deepest spirit of contrition and atonement, we therefore offer you these Sacrifices:

1.     We shall not stray from your dominion, looking to the false god called “Government” to deliver us from our sufferings and need.

2.     No: we shall hold steadfast, unwavering in our faith in your Banks and Corporations to relieve us of the miseries of debt and cursed usury.

3.     We shall further petition Caesar to relieve you of any remaining taxation or regulations which hath provoked your banishment of millions of our humble selves to the purgatory of Unemployment.

4.     We shall, moreover, praise the Bounty of your Market—rejecting all false prophets who would spread a contagion of doubt and rebellion.

O all-mighty Job-Creator, we kneel before thy throne of Wall Street.  Do not, we most humbly ask, forsake us!  It is in thy Power to give—under whatever terms you like!—what thou hast taken away.  If we covet the “Job,” however degrading and sinful it may be, it is only to serve our most reverend Lord and Master.  Harvesting the bounty of Profit to your utmost Glory, we shall glean that which remains for our unworthy yet devoted selves.

Oh merciful Job-Creator, thou hath taken away, yet thou canst give again!  Amen.

Since 1935, unions have been pretty much mainstream.  When a person hired into a “union shop,” he or she was required to join up, and begin paying regular monthly membership dues, and that’s how it worked.  Given that union jobs generally offered 15-20 percent better wages and benefits (not to mention safer and superior working conditions), and are highly coveted, that requirement was viewed not only as a fair trade-off, but as a privilege.

Then, despite a flourishing middle-class and an economy chugging along at a record pace—and national union membership rolls hovering at close to 35-percent—the anti-union forces (alas, both Republicans and Democrats) rose up, mobilized, and came up with the bumper-sticker concept of “right-to-work,” an arrangement that allows you to work in a union facility without having to join the union.  The states that embraced RTW were mainly in the Deep South and Southwest, which makes Indiana’s decision noteworthy.

But give these anti-union zealots some credit.  Their sappy, albeit close-to-meaningless phrase smacks of the same general good feeling conveyed by that “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” reference in the Declaration of Independence. Right to work.  Right to vote.  Right to choose.  Right to speak your mind.  It’s all good.  Hell, who’s going oppose something as basic the “right to work”?  After all, this is America, isn’t it?

Yet, if these RTW laws were actually examined, we might take a different view.  In fact, our first order of business might be to suggest they be called “right-to-become-hypocritical-unAmerican-blood-sucking-parasite” agreements.

While it’s true that workers who choose not to join the union can’t run for union office, or be appointed to committees, or vote in union elections, they’re still allowed to bury their greedy, non-dues-paying snouts in the union trough.  These “free-riders” not only receive full union wages and benefits, they have the right to file grievances when their contractual rights have been violated.  Not too shabby an arrangement.  Sort of like a draft-dodger being entitled to a Purple Heart.

Naturally, the business and political interests pushing these RTW initiatives make them sound as noble and quasi-altruistic as possible (remember “trickle-down economics”?), even though, in truth, they’re doing nothing more high-minded than trying to hang on to their money.  Apparently, the DNA that triggers a desire for lower taxes, greater profits, and Cayman Island bank accounts is intrinsic to human nature.  Anyone doubting the veracity of this simplistic proposition need only observe the response of Toddler A when Toddler B attempts to take away a valued toy.

And this acquisitive impulse has nothing to do with necessity.  Even with near-record unemployment, the Department of Commerce reported in November, 2010, that U.S. companies just had their best quarter….ever.  According to the DOC, businesses recorded profits at an annual rate of $1.66 trillion in the third quarter of 2010, which is the highest rate (in non-inflation-adjusted figures) since the government began keeping records more than 60 years ago.  All this while the middle-class continues to be chipped away.

But as selfish as businesses are, and as devious and monomaniacal as the Republican Party is in dedicating itself to crippling organized labor’s political influence (labor was reported to have spent $400 million getting Obama elected in 2008), it’s the workers themselves who cause the most heartburn.

Non-union workers who earn union wages and benefits—but don’t know why—are not only ignorant, they’re dangerous.   The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.  Non-union forklift drivers who earn $40,000 a year in a union shop, but cling to the belief that they’re doing it “on their own,” are not only gaming the system, they’re missing the point.  They don’t realize that without worker collectives and worker solidarity, the whole shebang would quickly devolve into “every man for himself,” which is precisely what corporations dream about when they go to sleep at night.

Workers with limited skills and a h.s. education—and without a labor union to back them up—would find themselves in economic free-fall.  Without outside help, they’d gradually slide all the way down until they hit the federal or state minimum.  Not a pretty outcome.  On the other hand, they would, of course, retain their “right” to work.

The Occupy Movement has shown itself to be very pro-labor, as can be seen in the outline of Occupy Washington, DC’s position statement: Worker’s Rights and Jobs.  But, we are not in lockstep with union leadership. Indeed, perhaps the most important difference is we are independent of the two political parties, while most unions are closely tied to the Democratic Party – and have been closely tied to the Democrats throughout the decline of the union movement.

One task of the Occupy Movement will be to pressure both parties to end restrictions on the rights of worker’s to organize. Many see the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 as the foundational step to union decline.  The law, which passed with majority votes from both parties to override a presidential veto, limited the rights of workers to organize, support each other, and made it difficult to start new unions. In addition, lack of enforcement of laws that protect unions from plant closings weakened union power. Race to the bottom corporate strategies seeking lower wages in states not friendly to unions, and now leaving a country to go to developing countries for cheap, virtual slave labor has been a key to weakening workers.  Policies can be developed to protect workers, but there is no backbone in the Democratic Party to do so, and the Republican Party is hostile to unions.

No doubt new approaches and new militancy is going to be required for the labor movement to be revived.  Merely managing the shrinkage of union members is a strategy for failure. Not challenging laws that block union organizing ensures union failure. Staying allied with a corporate-funded Democratic Party that has stood by while unions declined is a sure way to the end of labor power.  A break from the past fifty years is needed to deal with globalization, change to an information and a service worker-dominated country from a manufacturing country.  These are all very challenging tasks for labor leadership.

The Occupy Movement could be a critical ingredient in the revival of unions.  Unions had been an essential weight balancing against the power of concentrated wealth.  With the decline of unions we have seen wages for Americans peak in 1973, the minimum wage losing one-third of its value since its peak in 1968 and workers having a smaller and smaller percentage of the GDP.  The weakening of labor has been a key ingredient to the increasing concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of the 1%.

Yesterday we saw an example of how the Occupy Movement, working with labor, can achieve victories for workers.  West coast longshoremen seem to have resolved an important multi-year labor dispute, with the help of the Occupy Movement. In “Showdown Averted,”  after describing the valiant militancy of longshoreman, Ben Schreiner writes:

. . . one cannot overlook the impact the Occupy movement also had in bringing pressure to bear on EGT.  For example, the December Occupy-led West Coast port shutdown, called in solidarity with Local 21, succeeded in shutting down port terminals in Oakland, Portland, and Seattle.

Moreover, a solidarity caravan set to ferry both ILWU rank and file and occupiers from Seattle to Oakland in an attempt to block EGT’s looming attempt to begin operations at its terminal had raised the specter of thousands of protesters converging on the Port of Longview.  In fact, fearing a potential mass protest, EGT had resorted to calling on the US Coast Guard to safeguard its vessel and terminal.

Undoubtedly, such a combination of pressure coming from both the union and the greater community factored heavily into EGT’s calculus to return to the bargaining table.

It is not just the Occupy Movement that was key to this seeming success, longshoreman militancy was also key, Schreiner writes:

On two separate occasions, for instance, ILWU Local 21 and their supporters blocked trains from reaching EGT’s scab facility.  And back in September, longshoremen stormed the EGT terminal, allegedly dumping grain from an idle train car.

“Of course, such militancy has also extracted a heavy toll.  To date, the union faces more than $300,000 from numerous fines and federal injunctions.  The longshoremen and their families, meanwhile, have been subject to 75 arrests, 200 citations, and various other means of police intimidation and harassment.

The uniting of union militancy with Americans in revolt seems to have turned this conflict into a victory for workers.

Before claiming victory, the details of the settlement will have to be released and approved by the workers, but even so, this example shows how the Occupy Movement — united with labor — can protect worker’s rights.  This is an example we can build on to weaken corporate power and strengthen worker power as part of our efforts to shift power to the people.

Inevitably, after peeling past the pre-programmed slogans Ron Paulistas bring with them, you will discover a person – generally white and overwhelmingly male – looking for some alternative to mainstream politics. Ever susceptible to slick marketing campaigns thanks to a solid diet of American television, these zealots have bought it hook line and sinker in a typical conspiratorial fashion. The lynchpin is the Federal Reserve, a seemingly mysterious institution, which in the world of Ron Paul politics stands in as a more acceptable substitute for the variety of other conspiracy theories floating through far-right America including the Bilderbergs, the rich as secret lizard people and the Masons.

Yet, the idea that Ron Paul offers a kind of alternative to mainstream politics falls apart quite easily upon inspection. There are three primary reasons for this – two relate to Paul himself and the other is a function of mainstream politics more generally. In the end, it is more accurate to say that Ron Paul is mainstream politics unmasked, a raw version of what both Democrats and Republicans desire to become if left to their own devices.

Key to this is seeing Ron Paul economics for what they are. Forget the Fed. Leave aside all the slogans about “living within our means” and “punishing generations with debt” for a moment. Ron Paul is the most pro-corporate politician in the Presidential race. His economic policies would further unleash multinational corporations and the 1% who own them onto American society – with absolutely no restraints. Paul is virulently anti-union in part because unions give workers a collective identity in order to regulate worksites. He opposes government regulation on employers since he connects their activity to his notion of “liberty.” And he has repeatedly associated taxation, even taxation of the corporate world, as an affront to freedom.

Taken together, Ron Paul’s notion of economic liberty is an only slightly disguised version of the hyper-neoliberal ideas that have been circulating since the 1980s. What is different now is that the circulation is taking place in the aftermath of an economic crisis that has unmasked the bankruptcy of the very idea Paul is promoting – capitalist economics. Although Paul presents his economic proposals as alternative non-mainstream notions, they fit perfectly inside the rise of the multinational corporations and the deep enrichment of the 1%. Albert Einstein offered the best bit of advice on how to deal with folks like Ron Paul when he said “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Giving corporate America a free hand to rampage through our economy, our communities and our environment is more of the same.

Ron Paul supporters mix this pro-corporate economic package with a fairly typical set of reactionary social policies. He has opposed any legislation in support of gay marriage on the Federal level and was neutral on the “don’t ask don’t tell” seeing the problem as less one of discrimination and more of “seeing people as part of groups.” Paul’s positions on race are even murkier due to his frequent open associations with white supremacists and the general acceptance of his ideas amongst this repugnant community. But his most explicit reactionary position is reserved for gender, more specifically the issue of sexual harassment. Here, Paul claims that anything less than penetration does not qualify as sexual harassment – words don’t matter. Females who file sexual harassment suits are, according to Paul, oppressing others. They should, instead, just exercise their right to choose a different job. Misogynist victim blaming at its worst.

The final reason that Ron Paul is not an alternative is the very reason that links him to mainstream politics. Just like Obama, Romney and Gingrich, he offers no concrete plans to address the problems that most affect people’s everyday lives. He doesn’t have a serious plan for housing. He would, just as his counterparts, continue the failed capitalist housing policies, probably adding some rhetorical flair about the liberty and freedom built into the feelings of anxiety most Americans feel when it comes to housing. His education policy is similarly irresponsible. Paul chooses to devolve education decisions onto state and local government while giving private enterprises a strong hand in further commodifying education in America. And on health care, his policies are merely a pumped up version of the pro-market policies of his Democratic and Republican counterparts.

Although Paul’s foreign policy position is trumpeted as being far off from his Republican counterparts, it contains many mainstream elements. Paul himself is always quick to indicate that his “non-interventionist” position does not mean that he wishes to radically transform the US military. He constantly issues the call for a “strong national defense” which translates into a well-funded military. As he stated directly in a recent interview, “My Plan to Restore America does not cut one penny of defense.”

Unfortunately, Liberals and even some Greens have taken the anti-war bait and Ron Paul has been able to make coalitions with otherwise ideological opponents such as Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader. This has given Paul some cred among anti-war types while creating confusion between having a position against military intervention and being anti-militarist.

While the “Ron Paul as alternative” charade rolls along, candidates carrying ideas clearly outside of the mainstream struggle to carve out some media attention. One is from my own organization, the Socialist Party USA – Stewart Alexander. Alexander is running campaign for President on a platform filled with radical ideas that would address many of the problems raised by the 2008 economic crisis. He has some new medicine for an old illness.

On economics, the Alexander/Mendoza campaign recognizes the destructive role of the 1%. Creating a progressive tax structure that captures the wealth at the top of society, designing a banking system that works like a highly regulated public utility and addressing the unemployment crisis by viewing a job as a human right means transforming an economic system that has failed the 99%. Similar proposals to open the education to all, to preserve our precious natural resources and to fund a worker owned and managed cooperative sector are clearly different than the re-hashed blather being served up by mainstream politicians.

Economic democracy is also connected to personal freedom. The Alexander/Mendoza campaign is one of the few that recognizes just how corporate power prevents Americans from fully exercising their civil rights. Corporations are not people and people need a voice – a voice that will be unchained as a result of electoral reform, the breaking up of media monopolies and the campaign’s support of people’s right to self-determination whether it be through marriage, adoption or alternative family structures.

Finally, Stewart Alexander is offering a radically different approach to the military. He is a passionate anti-militarist. Both he and his running mate, the ex-Marine, Alex Mendoza know the wasteful destruction that the US military has created. The pair call for a closing of all foreign bases, an end to security state measures and, unlike Ron Paul, an immediate 50% reduction in the military budget. They understand that anti-militarism is about more than opposing intervention – it is about re-thinking how our country relates to the rest of the world.

So, as the Presidential campaign heats up, it is important to see past the media spin – especially when the spinning is done in order to create false alternatives. The Obama campaign will certainly begin its own campaign to present their candidate as offering solutions beyond the mainstream. Such claims will be every bit as shallow as the notion that Ron Paul offers some new set of ideas worthy of the mantle of being alternative. There are some alternatives out there and their voices need to be heard. One of them will be running red, on the ticket of the Socialist Party USA and carrying with him the hope of moving past the miserable future created for us by capitalism.

The agreement averts a looming showdown between EGT and the ILWU over the conglomerate’s refusal to hire longshoremen at its newly minted export grain terminal at the Port of Longview.

The details of the settlement were not immediately made public, but in the released statement, ILWU International President Robert McEllrath stated, “This is a win for the ILWU, EGT, and the Longview community.”

Thus, the ILWU’s two-year long struggle against EGT’s union busting in Longview appears to be at an end.  (Given EGT’s “negotiating” history, however, a measure of skepticism is perhaps in order until the deal actually comes to be finalized.)

It is imperative, then, to reflect back on how such an agreement was able to ultimately emerge.  Though McEllrath and EGT CEO Larry Clarke both praised the intervention and leadership of Governor Gregoire, the truth is that it was the militancy of the ILWU rank and file that finally forced EGT back to the bargaining table.

On two separate occasions, for instance, ILWU Local 21 and their supporters blocked trains from reaching EGT’s scab facility.  And back in September, longshoremen stormed the EGT terminal, allegedly dumping grain from an idle train car.

Of course, such militancy has also extracted a heavy toll.  To date, the union faces more than $300,000 from numerous fines and federal injunctions.  The longshoremen and their families, meanwhile, have been subject to 75 arrests, 200 citations, and various other means of police intimidation and harassment.

Certainly, though, one cannot overlook the impact the Occupy movement also had in bringing pressure to bear on EGT.  For example, the December Occupy-led West Coast port shutdown, called in solidarity with Local 21, succeeded in shutting down port terminals in Oakland, Portland, and Seattle.

Moreover, a solidarity caravan set to ferry both ILWU rank and file and occupiers from Seattle to Oakland in an attempt to block EGT’s looming attempt to begin operations at its terminal had raised the specter of thousands of protesters converging on the Port of Longview.  In fact, fearing a potential mass protest, EGT had resorted to calling on the US Coast Guard to safeguard its vessel and terminal.

Undoubtedly, such a combination of pressure coming from both the union and the greater community factored heavily into EGT’s calculus to return to the bargaining table.

And though it may be premature to deem the struggle a success—given that the details of the agreement have not yet been revealed—important lessons can still be gleaned from the struggle.  First and foremost, the fight in Longview has demonstrated the immense power of worker organization.  After all, through their organized and sustained fight back, the longshoremen from a small Washington town were able to drive a multi-billion dollar international corporation back to the negotiating table after two years of intransigence.  And of course in doing so, they have provided an enduring inspiration for working people the nation over.

Second, the struggle has illustrated the power of community solidarity in labor struggles, while also offering a potentially fruitful direction for the Occupy movement.  For if Occupy can continue to funnel its energy into labor struggles striving to achieve tangible victories for working people, it can begin the process of gaining a much wider base of working class support.  And potential opportunities to this end abound, with nearly 50 percent of workers proclaiming a desire to join a union, but only one out of every ten currently enjoying union representation.

And so, with an apparent victory in Longview, the struggle endures.  Let us hope, though, that the Occupy and labor movements can continue the struggle in concert.

Within weeks, if not days, the international conglomerate EGT Development will seek to commence operations at its new $200 million export grain terminal at the Port of Longview.  In refusing to use ILWU labor, EGT is breaking the precedent in place since the 1930s, which holds that all public port docks up and down the West Coast are to be worked by the ILWU.

As ILWU Local 21 in Longview maintains, the union’s struggle against EGT’s scab facility is indicative of “the fight of working people everywhere.”  It is, as the union continues, “a make-or-break struggle for all organized labor.”

Yet, as the ILWU and its allies ready to fight EGT’s union busting, the US military lies in wait to intervene on the behalf of the conglomerate.

As ILWU International President Rob McEllrath disclosed in a January 3 letter:

We have been told that this vessel will be escorted by armed United States Coast Guard, including the use of small vessels and helicopters, from the mouth of the Columbia River to the EGT facility.

The revelation that the Coast Guard (one of the five armed forces of the United States, and the lone military organization within the Department of Homeland Security) will be utilized to guard the EGT ship has drawn outrage and harsh condemnation from many within the labor community.  A January 9 resolution from the San Francisco Labor Council, for example, read in part:

This is the first use of the US military to intervene in a labor dispute on the side of management in 40 years—not since the Great 1970 Postal Strike when President Nixon called out the Army and National Guard in an (unsuccessful) attempt to break the strike.  The use of the Armed Forces against labor unions is something you expect to see in a police state.  This is part of a disturbing trend where the US military, acting as enforcers for the 1%, is poised to be used against our own people, as exemplified by the new law [the National Defense Authorization Act] allowing the military to imprison US citizens without trial…

…We condemn this use of the military as part of a union-busting campaign to lower the cost of labor on the waterfront and destroy the union.

Other labor organizations, meanwhile, have sent letters to President Obama in protest.  As a letter sent by the South Central Federation of Labor in Wisconsin states in part:

Use of our tax dollars and our military to assist such union busting is horrifying.  Mr. President, as Commander in Chief, we call upon you to order the Coast Guard to stand down, to not interfere on the side of management in this labor dispute.

Mr. Obama’s willingness to deploy military force ought, though, to be of little surprise.  Despite his campaign promise to “walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America,” Mr. Obama has consistently shown himself to be no champion of organized labor.  The president, after all, was all too content with leaving labor’s prized Employee Free Choice Act to unceremoniously rot in a Democratically controlled Congress.

But as President Obama clearly sides with management in Longview, the national AFL-CIO and its president, Richard Trumka, continue to maintain an indifference stance on the whole matter.

For its part, the AFL-CIO has maintained a virtual blackout of the Longview struggle, with no coverage of the dispute appearing on the federation’s website or blog.  As a frustrated reader commented on the federation’s blog, “It would be nice if the AFL-CIO Blog gave workers a voice by reporting on the struggle in Longview, Washington by ILWU Local 21.”

Mr. Trumka, on the other hand, has made just one statement on the matter, coming back in July.  In it, he deemed the struggle a mere “jurisdictional dispute.” Trumka’s remarks were prompted by an Oregon AFL-CIO Executive Board resolution condemning the actions of International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) Local 701—an AFL-CIO affiliate currently crossing ILWU pickets to work the EGT terminal—as “scab labor.”

Given that both unions reside within the national federation, Trumka went on to note that no AFL-CIO body had “the authority to intervene or take sides.”  He did clarify, however, that “this should not be construed as a judgment on the merits of the dispute.”

For Trumka, choosing to cloak his muteness in such a technicality may very well stem from the fact that the IUOE provides substantially more in annual membership fees to the AFL-CIO than the ILWU.

But if such a financial incentive is indeed driving Trumka’s public indifference, it is rather shortsighted.  For no matter the national AFL-CIO’s apathy, the struggle in Longview is proving to be a rather seminal event, bringing together organized labor, the Occupy movement, and an assortment of other activists in a direct fight against corporate greed.

And with such widespread support, coming from both within and without the house of labor, ample incentive and political cover would seemingly be in place for Trumka to step forth and take a firm stand against the jurisdictional raiding and corporate colluding of an AFL-CIO affiliate union.

Yet, as labor activist Harry Kelber writes, AFL-CIO leaders to this very day continue to “prefer a passive membership, rather than a militant one that might call for reforms.”  However, continuing to cling to such conservative pragmatism, while ignoring the broad working class militancy and solidarity presently unfolding around the Longview struggle, is a posture Trumka can ill afford to maintain.  For in doing so, Trumka only promises to relegate the AFL-CIO to further irrelevancy.

Thus, as President-“I’ll walk on that picket line with you”-Obama readies to send in the military against longshoremen in Longview, the time has come for all to take sides.  The struggle can no longer be credibly held as a jurisdictional matter; rather, it is a fight for all organized labor.  So, in the words of Florence Reece, the time has come to ask Mr. Trumka: Which side are you on?

Although the merger is expected to be ratified (more the result of apathy and resignation than exuberance), there is still some trepidation among SAG’s rank-and-file, because they know that “bigger” isn’t always “better,” and that sometimes “less” is “more.” If you want to win a track meet, you find one guy who can jump 7-feet, not seven guys who can jump 1-foot.

Like so many unions that opted for ill-advised “convenience mergers”—and then came to regret those decisions—these SAG members fear that by merging with AFTRA they will become marginalized and diluted to the point of ineffectiveness. There’s a time-honored axiom in organized labor: The bigger and more diverse a union, the less chance of it going out on strike.

I asked a well-placed and knowledgeable SAG insider for his views on the proposed merger. Because of a “non-disparagement” agreement that forbids union board and committee members to speak negatively about the proposal (How’s that for old-fashioned freedom of speech?), and because getting acting jobs in Hollywood is tricky enough without sacrificially identifying yourself as a “malcontent,” he requested anonymity. Here is his overview:

My biggest concern with the merger is the unknown impact it will have on SAG’s pension and health plans. A 2003 study suggested that merging SAG’s plans with AFTRA’s would result in the diminution of SAG’s overall package. A comprehensive study is imperative before we vote on this proposed merger.

SAG and AFTRA have been negotiating together since 1981. Some might say that the weaknesses that exist in key areas of our respective contracts today demonstrate that so-called ‘leverage’ doesn’t count for much if there is little evidence of a willingness to use that ‘leverage’ when needed.

I hope both unions agree to send out an objective ‘pro’ and ‘con’ statement included in the merger referendum. And I hope they agree to commissioning a feasibility study prior to the vote. Members should have access to all of this information prior to voting. From what I’ve read and what I know, this merger will not provide members with either what they are demanding or what they are expecting.

Historically, SAG, which has about 125,000 members and represents mainly actors, has been the stronger, savvier and more prestigious union. In addition to actors, AFTRA (which got its start in radio and has about 70,000 members) also represents emcees, hosts, comedians, television news personalities, DJs, sports and entertainment announcers, singers, dancers, professional pitchmen, etc. Approximately 40,000 people belong to both unions.

Both SAG and AFTRA negotiate with the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers), which means that the team of negotiators that sits across the table from the union at a contract bargain represents the interests of the producers. So it’s actors vs. producers. Artists vs. bean-counters. Guild vs. Alliance. Management vs. Labor. Surfers vs. Ho-dads. Any way you cut it, it’s your classic adversarial showdown.

Except for one detail. Some of the most influential card-carrying union members in Hollywood (Tom Hanks, George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, Robert DeNiro, et al) happen to be producers themselves. Nothing against any of those men—they’re good guys and excellent actors, every one of them—but such an arrangement is bound to raise questions about a conflict of interest.

Another troubling detail: Agents who represent professional actors are allowed to have equity in the projects being discussed. In other words, an agent who’s paid to get an actor a fair fee for a role in a movie is allowed to be a profit-taker in that same movie. He may be one of the movie’s producers. Again, that raises questions about a possible conflict of interest.

These and other anomalies are what make Hollywood labor relations so difficult to navigate. And not to whine about the media, but they haven’t been helpful. In fact, they’ve been an impediment. In 2008, the media unfairly characterized SAG’s Membership First negotiators as “hard-liners,” which was not only inaccurate, but, sadly, indicative of the depths to which people’s expectations have sunk. Apparently, we’ve reached the point where all it takes for workaday actors to be labeled “hard-liners” is to request that wealthy producers give them a fair shake at the bargaining table.

It’s now obvious that unions across the country are being assaulted, and that the middle-class is being systematically dismantled. And it’s equally obvious that Hollywood—glamorous and fabled as it is—has jumped on that bandwagon. What those Membership First officers were trying to do in 2008, despite a decidedly labor-hostile environment, was provide SAG membership with the best contract they could possibly deliver. And isn’t that the job of a labor union?

If this were a big-time industrial union, those Membership First folks would be regarded as nothing more or less than your garden variety union negotiators. Management pushes, they push back Only in the movie industry would they be depicted as subversive. Yet, given Hollywood’s unique labor dynamic, maybe none of this should surprise us. Maybe it should be expected. In fact, maybe it comes with the territory.

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Our nation, so richly endowed with natural resources and with a capable and industrious population, should be able to devise ways and means of insuring to all our able-bodied men and women, a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

– Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1937

Millions of people in the US work and are still poor. Here are eight points that show why the US needs to dedicate itself to making work pay.

One. How many people work and are still poor?

In 2011, the US Department of Labor reported at least 10 million people worked and were still below the unrealistic official US poverty line, an increase of 1.5 million more than the last time they checked. The US poverty line is $18,530 for a mom and two kids. Since 2007 the numbers of working poor have been increasing. About 7 percent of all workers and 4 percent of all full-time workers earn wages that leave them below the poverty line.

Two. What kinds of jobs do the working poor have?

One third of the working poor, over 3 million people, work in the service industry. Workers in other occupations are also poor: 16 percent of those in farming; 11 percent in construction; and 11 percent in sales.

Three. Which workers are most likely to be working and still poor?

Women workers are more likely to be poor than men. African American and Hispanic workers are about twice as likely to be poor as whites. College graduates have a 2 percent poverty rate while workers without a high school diploma have a poverty rate 10 times higher at 20 percent.

Four. What about benefits for low wage workers?

Ten percent of US workers earn $8.50 an hour or less according to the US Department of Labor. About 12 percent have health care and about 12 percent have retirement benefits. Nearly one in four get paid sick leave and less than half get paid vacation leave.

Five. What rights do the working poor have?

Most workers have a right to earn at least the federal minimum wage of $7.50 an hour. Tipped employees are supposed to get at least $2.13 each hour from their employer and if the worker does not earn enough in tips to make the $7.50 minimum wage, the employer must make up the difference. People who work more than 40 hours in a workweek are entitled to one and one-half of their regular pay for each hour of overtime.

Six. What about wage theft from the working poor?

Many low wage workers have part of their earnings stolen by their employers. Examples include not paying people the full minimum wage, not paying required overtime, stealing from tipped employees, or fraudulently classifying workers as independent contractors. A survey of over 4000 low wage workers in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York conducted by university and non-profit researchers found: 26 percent of the workers were paid less than the minimum wage in the previous week, a majority were underpaid by more than $1 an hour; a significant number worked overtime the previous week and were not paid the legally required overtime; many were required to come early or stay late and work “off the clock” and were not paid for it; almost a third of the tipped workers were not paid the minimum wage and more than 1 in 10 tipped workers had some of their money stolen by their employer or supervisor.

Seven. What is a living wage in the US?

Dr. Amy Glasmeier of Penn State University has created a Living Wage Calculator that estimates the hourly wage needed to pay the cost of living for low wage families in the US. It breaks down the cost of living by state and locality across the nation. In New Orleans, a mom with one child needs to earn $17.52 to make ends meet. In New York, the mom with one child should earn $19.66 to make it. If we now realistically calculate the number of people who work and do not earn a living wage, the numbers of working poor in the US skyrocket to several tens of millions.

Eight. What about jobs for the unemployed and underemployed?

The US Labor Department estimated recently that 13 million people were unemployed. Another 8 million people were working part-time but wanted full-time work. Even more millions who are not working are not counted in those numbers because they have been unemployed so long.

A study by Northeastern University found that in the poorest families, unemployment is nearly 31 percent. Underemployment is also much more of a problem in poor homes, with over 20 percent of those workers reporting they are working part-time but seeking full-time work.

Our nation can do so much more. We say our country values work. It is time to do something about it.

If the US truly values work, we need to support the millions of our sisters and brothers who are low wage workers. Steps needed include: raising the minimum wage to a living wage; protecting workers from getting ripped off; making it easier for workers to organize together if they choose to; and creating jobs, public jobs if necessary, so that everyone who wants to work can do so. Many are already working on these justice issues.

For those interested in learning more about this, see the websites of Interfaith Worker Justice, the National Employment Law Project, and the National Jobs for All Coalition.

There are more young people of working age out of work than at any time in recorded British history according to the latest government figures.

I started the current version of my online presence as it were in March of 2003 and have managed somehow to continue writing ever since, though I’ve had my share of blank spots along the way.

Writing on a regular basis used to be fairly easy for me but as the years have worn on and no doubt me wearing out, it gets more and more difficult for me to face up to a world that has gone from bad to worse to downright dire in the course of my lifetime.

Thus these days, I’m more often reading and thinking about events than writing about them, in an attempt to get a handle on why we inhabitants of Empire are standing by as we watch our leaders head straight for disaster yet again as they try vainly to keep the ‘good ship capitalism’ afloat. The myopia of the media is palpable in the face of the disaster that unfolds around us.

Sir Halford J Mackinder (1861–1947)…was a member of the ‘Coefficients Dining Club’ established by members of the ['socialist'] Fabian Society in 1902. The continuity of the policies of the elite is indicated by the fact Brzezinski starts from Mackinder’s thesis first propounded in 1904: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland: Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island: who commands the World-Island commands the world.”¹

Eric Walberg’s otherwise excellent book Post modern imperialism geopolitics and the great games also utilizes Mackinder’s metaphor of the The Great Game to great effect, to map out what he describes as three distinct ‘games played’, the days of Mackinder’s British Empire being ‘Game 1′.

But I fear that the use of this metaphor, handy though it is in shorthanding the machinations of imperialism brings with it the danger of a kind of fatalism, reducing us to mere pawns on Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard. A view I might add, that reinforces our fatalism as it transforms sociopaths like Brzezinski into a character out of an Ayn Rand novel, possessed of super powers and the natural inheritor of Mackinder’s haughty and arrogant view of the world.

In turn, I think it reinforces the totally false belief that there is no alternative to capitalism no matter that it’s proved itself to be a complete disaster for the planet. A kind of collective acceptance of the status quo that is reinforced by the MSM that will not entertain any kind of rational debate about the alternatives.

Not surprisingly, this Superman belief concerning the ‘inevitability’ of capitalism is the bedrock of the neoliberal view of how things work, harking back as it does to the days of Mackinder when a handful of men effectively ruled an Empire without challenge, divvying up an occupied world according to an imperial pecking order of power.

Meanwhile we get fed a diet of little more than mysticism and wishful thinking from the media pundits and when that doesn’t work the subject is simply ignored. How the MSM manages the task of totally obscuring the reality of the way capitalism actually functions can only be accomplished by constructing an entirely false reality, one that omits certain fundamental facts about the nature of capitalism, especially its history.

Thus WWI was the result of a spat between aristocrats somewhere in the Balkans and WWII was started by a deranged megalomaniac and the destruction of Iraq the result of ‘faulty intelligence’. And each time we let them get away with it, they become more emboldened, more brazen in their predations knowing full well that it will get no real opposition from its captive public.

Meanwhile…

Our busted economy is simply the result of ‘us’ spending too much, thus justifying the need to have ‘our belts tightened’. Note that for the rich 1% ‘belt tightening’ is obviously not a problem nor have any of the previous crises of capitalism and the resultant ‘belt tightening’ experienced by the rest of us affected the 1%.

‘Boom and bust’ no matter what the pundits say, is built into the very nature of capitalism. At best ‘tinkering’ with it brings a temporary reprieve from the inevitable and even the ‘tinkering’ is the result of working class intervention into the affairs of capitalism eg, the ‘welfare state’. Ultimately, the outcome every time is war and the bigger the better to chow all that surplus capital in an orgy of destruction such as we are currently witnessing. Each ‘small’ war leading inevitably to bigger and bigger wars.

Meanwhile…

SCROOGE AND CHORUS:
Christmas comes but once a year,
So you better cash in, While the spirit lingers,
It’s slipping through your fingers, Boy!
Don’t you realize Christmas can be such a Monetary joy!

/../

CHORUS:
On the first day of Christmas,
The advertising’s there, with Newspaper ads,
Billboards too,
Business Christmas cards,
And commercials on a pear tree. . .
Jingles here, jingles there, Jingles all the way.
Dashing through the snow, In a fifty-foot coup-e
O’er the fields we go, Selling all the way. . .
Deck the halls with advertising, What’s the use of compromising, Fa la la la la la la la la. — Green Christmas by Stan Freeberg

Freeberg’s cutting song on the commercialization of Christmas hit the stores in 1958. So how does our corporate media handle the paradox of Christian ‘giving’ with the making of money? Even more important, how does the MSM handle boosting Christmas sales with the fact that it’s also boosting the myth that we ‘all’ have to tighten our belts in these ‘times of austerity’? It really is a case of squaring the circle but how does the MSM achieve this miraculous result?

Every Christmas/New Year the MSM carries a slew of stories about the economy, prefacing every comment on the hoped for orgy of consumption, that retailers make 80% of their profits over the holiday period. Is this meant to make us feel bad if we don’t consume the required amount of tat?

So all the while as thousands lose their jobs, homes and social rights, the MSM is punting the idea that basically everything is okay, a temporary blip in the upward curve of capitalist ‘growth’. Spend and everything will come right? Right?

The UK economy will remain weak for the foreseeable future, but recession is not inevitable, according to a survey by the British Chambers of Commerce.”²

Thus we are exhorted to spend, spend, spend- without producing anything of substance. Even the much-touted digital revolution which would have turned the populace into ‘new media’ entrepreneurs if you listened to how the pundits describe it, relies on surplus cash to exist. Three hundred quid on a piece of electronic junk that will be ‘obsolete’ this time next year when you can’t pay the mortgage?

What it does reveal is the MSM has to avoid revealing the paradox of austerity and conspicuous consumption coexisting and the reason’s pretty obvious: the UK doesn’t produce much of anything anymore, relying instead on consumption (and its supporting infrastructure) and of course the financial sector, the mainstay of what passes for a British economy.

The end-product is a parasitical economy, the result of maintaining the rate of profit by exporting production to low-wage countries and relying on debt-fueled consumption to turn over the local economy but an economy that has become less and less relevant to international finance capital. So kiss the ‘good times’ goodbye. Any ‘recovery’, should it happen will be at a lower level of employment, with fewer real jobs, more temporary, deskilled labour, to serve a shrunken ‘middle class’ and the elite.

Social support will be cut to the absolute minimum the state can get away with. Resistance will be met with the full force of the corporate/security state with the Summer ’11 riots serving as an example of what happens when you deliberately allow ‘them’ to get on with the lootin’ anna burnin’. And so far, organized labour’s response has been half-hearted and sporadic without any clear direction of what to offer as an alternative tied as it is to the Labour Party’s coattails.

What’s left of the local economy will be hi-tech, information-based research and production as part of a global corporate, military-financial-media complex over which we have absolutely no control.

The situation is unique in the history of capitalism. The formerly Great Britain, ‘workshop to the world’, the greatest Empire the world had ever seen, the home of the Industrial Revolution, deliberately de-industrializes its economy and relies instead on its control of the global circuit of capital to produce ‘growth’ in the form of ficticious money that in turn it lent to its captive consumers at enormous rates of compound interest.

The ‘wealth’ created from the interest charged on the loans was then used to create an even greater pile of ficticious wealth by manipulating the markets on a global scale through the creation of equally ficticious financial ‘instruments’. Great fun while it lasted. Piles of dosh, in fact far too much capital and all of it ficticious, sloshing about in a system that has literally eaten itself alive.

The genesis of the current crisis can in part be traced back to Thatcher’s original decision to turn the UK into a ‘property-owning democracy’ by selling off publicly-owned housing. A decision that transformed the populace into a nation of debtors’ and most importantly, it locked them in debt for life (and beyond); a house being the single biggest investment people ever make. At the same time, entire industries were closed down and their coherent, class-conscious communities destroyed. An entire epoch wiped out in a stroke. Enter the Age of Credit.

Trapped on a treadmill of debt is it any wonder that no one wants to ‘rock the boat’? This might sound somewhat melodramatic but it would appear that only a wholesale collapse of the economy will produce the right conditions for the potential for revolutionary change to begin. But is this what we want to happen?

Meanwhile, given the the dire state of things, just as it did in the 1930s, the Empire ratchets up the case for war but war of a different kind having learned a brutal lesson from media coverage of the Vietnam War that thousands of Imperial troops dying in front of you, live on your television screens was extremely bad for business.

Just as the Imperial blueprints have made plain, the Empire, using a combination of media manipulation, hi-tech weapons and its stranglehold on international finance, can wage war ‘at a distance’ from its domestic populations. Using a professional army plus of course its mercenary minions to crush all resistance with barely a murmur from the metropolis. Imperial deaths, such as they are, are given full state/media funerals, after all one imperial death must be worth at least 100 (fill in the country) deaths.

Economic/political crisis at home equals wars abroad, it’s that simple. Is the Empire insane enough to start a nuclear war? Well as they’ve done before, they must think they can–in their terms–get away with it again. It would certainly divert our attentions away from our domestic woes- for a time. The ‘collateral damage’ would be too immense to calculate let alone contemplate thus such things are not touched upon when the MSM talks of the West ‘losing patience with Iran’ echoing the Empire’s threats of ‘taking out’ Iran’s nuclear facilities if it doesn’t behave itself and do as its told.

It’s also difficult to contemplate what the international repercussions of a ‘surgical nuclear strike’ on Iran would be. I find it inconceivable that the Russians and possibly the Chinese would not know about it in advance. The Empire, in spite of its power, can’t just go lobbing nuclear weapons about willy-nilly (and by Empire I include Israel, it’s mini-assassin) although the use of ‘Depleted Uranium‘ has barely caused a ripple of discontent in the populace, no doubt it’s not dramatic enough. The name by the way, doesn’t mean it ain’t radioactive, just less radioactive than its lethal parent U-235.

And just as importantly, it’s a test of Russia’s resolve just as in 1990 when the Empire decided that Saddam Hussein’s regime had lived past its sell-by date. What would the Russians do if the US encroached on what been traditionally, Russia’s patch? Well we know the answer to that but what of the present? Once again is it to be left to a reluctant Russia to stare down the Empire whilst we stand by, passive observers of our own, and others, fate?

1. The Elite, the ‘Great Game’ and World War III, by Prof. Mujahid Kamran
2. UK recession ‘not yet inevitable,” BBC News 10/01/2012.

On January 1, 1912, a new Massachusetts law had gone into effect that cut the maximum work week to 54 hours. Mill workers’ pay was given out on Fridays, not for the week just ended but for the previous week; thus, on Friday afternoon, January 12, 1912, workers received their pay for the work week of Monday, January 1 through Saturday, January 6. Workers found their pay to be an average of 32¢ short, representing the fewer hours that the mill workers had toiled. On Friday, January 12, upon finding that their pay had been shorted, 11,000 of Lawrence’s 28,000 mill workers walked off their jobs immediately; by the next day, the strike had grown to 13,000 workers.

The position of the mill owners was the essence of simplicity: you cannot expect us to pay for work that is not done. If the Massachusetts legislature is so benighted as to limit the number of hours that workers may work, the result is that workers will directly and immediately suffer the inevitable consequence: they will earn less money. It’s not our fault; it is the fault of the misguided legislature.

The plight of the mill workers in Lawrence in 1912 was unimaginable by today’s standards. Adults earned between $3 and $10 a week for work that often exceeded 60 hours a week. Overtime pay did not exist. Wages were allocated in a strict hierarchy depending on the nationality of the workers – there were Syrians, Greeks, Turks, Germans, Italians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Russians, Poles, Jews, Irish; each one received a different hourly wage for identical work. Blacks, of course, were the lowest paid. The law technically forbade labor by children under 14, but children as young as 10 often worked the same work week as adults (but were only paid half as much). Workplace safety was nonexistent, and workers were frequently maimed or killed by the mill machinery. Workers, especially children, were literally (not figuratively), starving to death; infant mortality accounted for half the deaths in Lawrence.

On January 12, 1912, 1% of the U.S. population owned 50% of the nation’s wealth. (By comparison, today the top 1% of the U.S. population owns “only” 37% of the nation’s wealth, though it is also true that the bottom 80% own only 15% of the nation’s wealth.)

On Sunday, January 14, 1912, three companies of militia were called in and martial law came to Lawrence. Striking workers picketed, and soldiers guarded the mills. Also on January 14, Wobbly organizer Joe Ettor arrived in Lawrence from New York.

Each day during that first week of the strike, fewer people went to work. By Saturday, January 20, 20,000 of the 28,000 mill workers in Lawrence were on strike, and every mill in the city was shut. On Tuesday, January 17, the strikers issued their demands (which were also the essence of simplicity). The strikers had four demands: (1) 15% pay raise for all mill workers; (2) double pay for overtime; (3) an end to the hated “bonus system” that paid extra money for meeting special, elevated production targets; and (4) amnesty for strikers. On Wednesday, January 18, 10,000 strikers held their first public parade; incongruously they marched behind an American flag singing The Internationale. The paraders were met and dispersed by soldiers with bayoneted rifles. More companies of militia were mobilized; mills were guarded by sharpshooters. On Thursday, January 19, another parade of 10,000 striking workers defied martial law and wound through the streets.

Also on January 19, dynamite was “discovered” at three locations in Lawrence frequented by strike organizers. Although strike organizers were arrested for possession of dynamite, it was later shown that the dynamite had been planted by minions of Billy Wood, the most hated of the Lawrence mill owners.

On Tuesday, January 23, strike organizers opened the first of several soup kitchens in Lawrence to feed the starving strikers and their families. First hundreds, then thousands of dollars poured into the Lawrence strike headquarters from all over the country, often in the form of a coin or two in an envelope. On Wednesday, January 24, another dangerous, radical Wobbly organizer arrived in Lawrence: Big Bill Haywood was met at the Lawrence train station by a jubilant, singing crowd of 10,000 strikers. Formal, dues-paying, card-carrying membership in the IWW soared to an unprecedented 10,000 members in Lawrence.

One of the most interesting aspects of the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence is the degree to which the main strike organizers, the Wobblies, and especially Joe Ettor, explicitly preached nonviolence to the strikers. In another strike seven years later (in 1919), the famous pacifist organizer A. J. Muste came to Lawrence to aid striking textile workers. One morning in that later strike, strikers awoke to find the men guarding the mills armed with machine guns. Quite understandably, strikers also wanted to arm themselves. A.J., ever the pacifist, cautioned against arms. “Let the mill owners try to weave cloth with machine guns,” A.J. is said to have counseled. What is interesting about the 1912 strike is that (unlike A.J.) the Wobblies were most emphatically not ideological pacifists. Yet the Wobblies clearly and unequivocally counseled nonviolence as the only tactic for the strikers that could be successful.

From the very first day he arrived in Lawrence, Wobbly organizer Joe Ettor repeatedly told the strikers: “As long as the workers keep their hands in their pockets, the capitalists cannot put their hands in there. With passive resistance, with the workers absolutely refusing to move, lying absolutely still, they are more powerful than all the weapons that the mill owners have to attack the workers.” On Monday morning, January 15, with the city under martial law, with armed troops everywhere, Ettor advised against any resort to violence: “You cannot win by fighting with your fists against men that are armed, or against the militia, but you have a stronger weapon than they have. You have the weapon of labor, and they cannot beat you down if you stick together.” When troops fired upon parading strikers and turned hoses on them (in one of the coldest New England winters on record), Ettor said, “You may turn your hoses on the strikers, but there is being kindled a flame in the heart of the workers, a flame of proletarian revolt, which no fire hose in the world can ever extinguish.” In a speech to rallying strikers, Ettor said: “Order can be kept, but I never saw order kept by bayonets. I want you all to understand that our cause cannot be won by spilling blood. Peaceful persuasion is the only weapon advocated from this platform!” As I say, the Wobblies were emphatically not committed to nonviolence for moral or ideological reasons, but nonviolent they clearly were. Their commitment was strictly a tactical one.

This strategic, tactical commitment to nonviolence puts me in mind of Gene Sharp. Gene has spent much of the past 40 years tweaking pacifists; Sharp’s line goes something like this: You pacifists should abandon your quaint, holier-than-thou, elitist moral commitment to nonviolence; nonviolence should be embraced because it is far more effective than violence. And for 40 years, we pacifists have smiled indulgently at Gene’s rebukes – after all, despite his present-day posturing, Gene was himself first a moral pacifist; indeed, one who was sentenced to two years in prison during the Korean War for his outspoken (moral) opposition to conscription. I believe that there is an odd convergence here: both Joe Ettor and Gene Sharp (in their respective, different eras) are preaching a substantially similar line: forget your highfalutin moralism; nonviolent direct action is a brilliant, winning tactic for effective campaigns by the dispossessed.

On the eighteenth day of the strike, Monday, January 29, 1912, a striking worker, Anna LoPizzo, was shot and killed by a police officer (Oscar Benoit) during a strikers’ demonstration in the streets. On Tuesday, January 30, a second striker, John Rami, was bayoneted to death by a soldier. The same day, Wobbly organizer Joe Ettor, and another man, Arturo Giovannitti, were arrested for complicity in Anna LoPizzo’s murder. The two men were a mile away when LoPizzo had been shot. The government’s legal theory was laughable by today’s standards: if these dangerous union organizers had not stirred up trouble, there would have been no riot, and Anna LoPizzo would not have been shot. (Here is an analogy: On May 4, 1970, National Guard troops at Kent State University shot and killed four students demonstrating nonviolently for peace in Vietnam. Imagine if the next day the police had arrested the student president of the Kent State SDS chapter, who was off campus when the killings occurred – because if those trouble-making SDS organizers hadn’t stirred up trouble, there would have been no protesting students for the troops to shoot.) Ettor and Giovannitti were eventually acquitted by a jury, but not until November 25, 1912, long after the strike was over. By then, the false arrest of Ettor had fully accomplished its purpose – he had been kept in jail through the remainder of the strike.

Lawrence mill owners specifically, and U.S. capitalists more generally, responded to progressive calls for improved working conditions in at least two different ways. First, mill owners refused to negotiate with strikers. They relied on troops to keep order, and (where possible) on scabs to keep mills open. Strike organizers were fired and then blacklisted, so they could never find work elsewhere. If necessary, they were framed and sent to prison (like Joe Ettor) or shot (like Wobbly songwriter Joe Hill, who was framed for murder and executed by a Utah firing squad on November 19, 1915).

A second way of dealing with calls for improved working conditions was through the courts. This was the so-called Lochner era, during which a deeply conservative Supreme Court struck down literally hundreds of progressive state laws involving minimum wages, maximum work weeks, worker safety, child labor, and so forth. The eponymous case for which the era was named was Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905), which struck down a New York law setting a maximum of 60-hour work week and 10-hour work day in New York bakeries. Another famous case of the era was Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U.S. 1 (1915), which struck down laws that restricted so-called “yellow-dog contracts” – that is, the Court was striking down union-backed legislation that made it illegal for employers to require that employees not join a union. The ideological underpinning of the Lochner-era cases was “freedom of contract,” as guaranteed in the Constitution. If the mill workers of Lawrence want to work 60 hours a week for, say, 15¢ an hour and send their 10-year-old children to work in the mills for half that amount, the sanctity of freedom of contract required that the state not interfere.

The strikers in Lawrence had another tactic. In several successive waves, they sent away hundreds of the starving, emaciated children of strikers to New York, Philadelphia, Vermont, and elsewhere to stay with wealthy families who would care for the children for the duration of the strike. The exodus of malnourished children made national headlines and generated considerable sympathy for the strikers. On Sunday, February 25, 1912, heavily armed police and soldiers used violence to break up a huge crowd of strikers seeing their children off at the Lawrence train depot. The reports of the brutal police riot were reported nationally and helped to build further support for the strikers – in much the same way that extensive media coverage of Police Chief Bull Connor’s turning attack dogs and fire hoses on civil rights marchers in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1963 built support for the civil rights movement (leading President Kennedy to comment that no person since Abraham Lincoln had aided civil rights more than Bull Connor).

On Saturday, March 9, 1912, the first mill owner capitulated to the strikers, and other mill owners soon followed suit. The strikers did not win a complete victory, but they did win a substantial one. There were across-the-board wage increases; the increases averaged about 15% and the lowest-paid workers realized the largest increases, thereby making wage scales somewhat more equitable. Overtime pay was not granted, but the hated bonus system was substantially curtailed, and there was an amnesty for most strikers (except prominent strike organizers who were, of course, blacklisted). And the Lawrence strike had cascading effects elsewhere: in the weeks and months after the successful conclusion of the Lawrence strike, 250,000 other textile workers throughout New England won substantial pay increases from mill owners without striking! Eugene Debs, running for President that year on the Socialist Party ticket, commented, “The victory at Lawrence was one of the most decisive and far-reaching ever won by organized workers.”

And it all started 100 years ago, on January 12, 1912.

•  This article first appeared in New Clear Vision.

In a January 3 letter addressed to his members, ILWU International President Robert McEllrath disclosed that EGT will soon attempt to commence operations at its new $200 million grain terminal located at the Port of Longview.  As McEllrath wrote, “We believe that at some point this month a vessel will call at the EGT facility in Longview, Washington… Prepare to take action when the EGT vessel arrives.”

The Struggle and Its Stakes

At the heart of the Longview dispute has been EGT’s refusal to hire longshoremen from ILWU Local 21 to work its grain terminal at the Port of Longview.  The publicly owned port—as with all West Coast public port docks—has been worked exclusively by the ILWU for decades.

Dismissing this hard-won jurisdiction, EGT chose to break off negotiations with the ILWU last year and contract with a third party employing labor from International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) Local 701.  The ILWU argues that this is in direct violation of EGT’s lease agreement with the Port of Longview, which explicitly stipulates all port work is to indeed be done by the ILWU.

For its part, IUOE Local 701 has been widely condemned within the Northwest labor community, with many accusing the local of conspiring with EGT to break the ILWU.  Both the Washington and Oregon state AFL-CIO bodies, along with numerous other unions, have already passed resolutions condemning Local 701.  The July resolution passed by the Oregon AFL-CIO described 701’s actions at the EGT terminal as “scab labor.”

The national AFL-CIO, on the other hand, has remained conspicuously muted on the dispute.  No mention of the ILWU’s struggle in Longview can be found on the federation’s website or blog.  In fact, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has referred to the entire matter as a mere “jurisdictional dispute.”

Yet despite the AFL’s seeming indifference, the outcome of the struggle couldn’t have greater stakes.  As Kyle Mackey, Secretary/Treasurer of the Cowlitz-Wahkiakum Central Labor Council (the umbrella labor body for the Longview area), argues, “If EGT succeeds, they will have essentially broken the ILWU.”  As he explains:

First, they will set a precedent that work on public port docks is no longer automatically longshore jurisdiction. Then within less than a year, when the northwest grain handlers’ agreement is set to be negotiated, all the other grain elevators will seek to either go non-ILWU or to match the eroded standard EGT creates. Shortly thereafter, in 2014, the ILWU will negotiate its master contract with the Pacific Maritime Association. If they lose, you can bet the PMA will take notice and hit hard.

In the midst of a nationwide attack on organized labor and the right to collectively bargain, the defeat of the powerful ILWU would also be sure to have consequences reaching far beyond the docks.

The Call for Solidarity

Responding to the intensifying situation, the Cowlitz-Wahkiakum Central Labor Council on January 2 passed a resolution calling for solidarity action to stop the EGT vessel from being loaded.  The resolution read in part:

Be it Resolved: That this Council call out to friends of labor and the “99 percent” everywhere to come to the aid of ILWU Local 21, and to support them in any way possible in their fight against multinational conglomerate EGT. And,

Be it further Resolved: That this Council request that anyone willing to participate in a community and labor protest in Longview, Washington, of the first EGT grain ship do so when called upon by this body.

Accordingly, planning for a regional solidarity caravan to shuttle ILWU rank-and-file and other supporters to Longview on word of the EGT vessel’s arrival is already underway.  With the support of the San Francisco Labor Council, ILWU Local 10, for one, has already pledged funds for a bus to ferry rank-and-file picketers up to Longview once given the word.

The Northwest Occupy movement, meanwhile, has also begun to mobilize.  On December 19, Occupy Longview issued a call for Occupy activists to converge on the port to blockade the loading of any vessel at EGT’s terminal.  As Occupy Longview stated:

We are calling out to all occupies, from New York City down to Florida, all the way through to the West Coast, to join us in solidarity… We ask that tens of thousands travel to Longview to join us and make this action the central action for January 2012.

Occupy and The ILWU

The inclusion and participation of outside activists in the ILWU’s Longview struggle—such as those from the Occupy movement—has not been without its share of controversy.  As was widely publicized, the ILWU leadership refrained from embracing the West Coast Port Shutdown in December, which the Occupy movement had called in part to show solidarity with the ILWU in the struggle against EGT.  In fact, the Occupy-led port shutdown led a few unionist and other observers to question the merits and rationale behind an action conducted without much in the way of ILWU input and participation.

Occupy activist, though, maintained that they did indeed have rank-and-file support for the action.  Moreover, they argued that the antagonistic statements coming from the ILWU leadership regarding the port shutdown were merely for legal cover.  (Local 21, for instance, already faces upwards of $300,000 in fines due to unfair labor practice charges accrued from its ongoing struggle.)

Regardless, the matter of independent action conducted in solidarity with, or in the name of, the ILWU remains an issue.  As President McEllrath cautioned in his January 3 letter, “Any showing of support for Local 21 at the time that a vessel calls at the EGT facility must be measured to ensure that the West Coast ports have sufficient manpower so as not to impact cargo movement for PMA member companies. A call for a protest of EGT is not a call for a shutdown of West Coast ports and must not result in one.”

Facing a Stacked Deck

The dictate to limit any ILWU action to EGT in Longview stems from the severe restrictions American labor law places on unions.  As McEllrath notes in his letter to members, “Locals need to be aware of the narrow path that we must cut through a federal labor law (the Taft-Hartley Act) that criminalizes worker solidarity, outlaws labor’s most effective tools, and protects commerce while severely restricting unions.”

Of course, in addition to repressive labor laws, a key challenge facing any attempt to effectively blockade EGT’s terminal from beginning operations will be the expected heavy-handed police presence.  To date, at least 75 out of the 200 Local 21 members have already faced arrest, citation, fines, or both.  (Little surprise, then, to learn that EGT has made contributions to local police and fire bureaus.)

But as for what to expect once EGT seeks to load a grain barge later this month, McEllrath warns, “We have been told that this vessel will be escorted by armed United States Coast Guard, including the use of small vessels and helicopters, from the mouth of the Columbia River to the EGT facility and that the facility itself will be protected by a full complement of local law enforcement from multiple jurisdictions.”

But even facing such a stacked deck—with the courts, police, and, needless to say, the media conspiring against them—make no mistake: the ILWU has never been a union to back away from a struggle.  As ILWU Local 21 President Dan Coffman has stated, “The ILWU cannot lose this fight; we are in it to it to win it.”

And so it is that as we approach the one-year anniversary of the Wisconsin uprising, the long sleeping giant that is American labor stirs once more.

It’s hard to assess how much praise Obama deserves for making these moves.  On the one hand, appointing members to the NLRB ain’t exactly a landmark achievement.  After all, presidents have been appointing board members since 1935, when the NLRB was first established, so the “presidential act” of picking suitable people (it used to be three, until the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act expanded it to five) to fill out the roster shouldn’t be gushed over.  It’s his job, isn’t it?

On the other hand—given that the Republicans despise any agency with the power to regulate business, given that they’ve fought for 75 years to defang the NLRB, given that they’ve purposely tried to keep it understaffed (aware that two members don’t constitute a quorum and, therefore, don’t have the authority to issue rulings), and given that, even with a 53-47 senate majority ready to approve Obama’s appointees, they’ve threatened to filibuster any nominee—it was a bold move.  Bold, necessary, and, let’s be honest, way overdue.  Credit goes to organized labor for keeping the president’s feet to the fire.   That reported $400 million they donated to the Democrats in 2008 finally bought them something.

What the Republicans characterize as “interfering with” and “restricting” business, the NLRB views as providing employee safeguards—safeguards expressed in our federal labor law. For example, when people get fired illegally for engaging in union activism, or when a workforce formally requests a union election but is denied, or when the management negotiating team refuses to bargain in good faith—that’s when the NLRB (in principle) comes to the rescue.

Although congressional Republicans are already threatening legal action and issuing hysterical statements (Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi referred to the appointments as a sign of the White House’s “contempt for America’s small businesses”), there’s not much they can do about it, which means the NLRB, at least through 2012, is going to have a fair amount of latitude in addressing workers’ rights.

And one major area of concern will be union membership drives.  According to surveys, upwards of 60 percent of American workers have expressed an interest in joining a union, attracted by across-the-board advantages in union wages, benefits and working conditions.  But national membership stands at barely over 12 percent. While part of that differential can be traceable to the unreliability of surveys, the real culprit is management’s ability to keep its employees from joining up by using its two favorite weapons:  stalling and intimidation.

There are hundreds (thousands!) of documented cases of companies illegally attempting to dissuade their workers from joining a union.  They threaten, they lie, they bully, they bribe, they spy, they hire outside agencies to assist them.  I knew a retired woman who, on a whim, decided to take a part-time job at Wal-Mart to augment her pension.  She said she was blown away by the level of anti-union propaganda.  As a new employee, the first order of business was being shown a 45-minute movie on the evils of labor unions.

Without the FDA (Food and Drug Administration, formed way back in 1906), one can imagine the sort of liberties that would be taken by manufacturers looking for shortcuts and angles.  The same applies to the NLRB.  Without the labor board acting as a clearing house for employee complaints, there would be no workplace justice.  Without the NLRB, we would see the rise of “employer tyranny.”   Indeed, many would argue that we already see it….even with the board.  Clearly, it’s an uphill battle.

Early evidence of this perception was seen in the draconian measures instituted at Sweden’s IKEA manufacturing plant in Danville, Virginia.  After getting the local community to pony up more than $12 million in tax breaks and other subsidies (as an inducement for IKEA to locate its factory in this job-starved region of Virginia), it didn’t take long for the company to show its true colors.

They not only hired a union-busting outfit to keep the IAM (International Association of Machinists) from making a run at the employees, they proceeded to drastically slash employee wages, and unilaterally modify long-standing work and overtime rules.  Needless to say, these measures not only would have been frowned upon by Swedish society, but most of them would’ve been illegal.  They would have been in violation of Sweden’s labor laws.

As brutal as the Danville crackdown was, a similar move is occurring at the AAK (AahusKarishamn) oils and fats processing plant, in Louisville, Kentucky.  The Louisville plant was formerly owned and operated by Golden Brands, but was sold to the Swedish multinational corporation last July.  Despite having had a fairly cooperative relationship with Golden Brands for more than 25 years, once the company changed hands, things turned ugly in a hurry.

Within months, AAK launched an unprecedented anti-union campaign, one that culminated in—and this is going to sound preposterous—the company circulating a decertification petition, urging the fifty members of Chapter 320 of the National Conference of Firemen and Oilers (NCFO/Local 32BJ SEIU) to voluntarily leave their union.

The arrogance and audacity of such a move was mind-boggling.  Had management dared circulate a union decertification petition in Sweden, the company’s executives would’ve been strung up by their Buster Browns and pelted with lingenberries.

But when the decert effort failed, AAK became even more determined.  The company not only threatened to fire members of the union bargaining committee if they didn’t recommend to their fellow workers ratification of a grossly inferior contract, but their negotiators came to the bargaining table armed with a set of ultimatums that would have effectively stripped the union of its legitimacy (including abolishing the union security clause and eliminating seniority rights).

Say what you will about the Swedes, but they’re shrewd and resourceful.  Accordingly, they were perceptive enough to realize that the United States no longer qualifies, technically, as a “country”—at least not in the way that Sweden qualifies as one.

The U.S. seems to have lost its sense of identity; it no longer feels like a national community.  Rather, it has mutated into a gladiatorial arena, a battleground where corporations compete for profits in a merciless zero-sum game, where everything is reduced to winners and losers, and where, unfortunately, the federal labor laws are so weak they practically guarantee that the workers will always be the losers.

What we have before us is an example of Sweden—arguably one of the most socially and economically enlightened countries in the world—looking for a prostitute who will do things its own citizens won’t do.  And that prostitute happens to be America.  Whoever said it was right….we are, indeed, the Land of Opportunity.

“To be internationalist is to pay our debt to humanity” says Fidel Castro and this can be read on many billboards in Cuba.

What is internationalism?—cooperation among people and nations, states my dictionary. The book of definitions maintains that internationalism is a principle of communism and socialism. It is the belief of ideological leaders such as Lenin, Fidel and Che.

Che wrote in his essay, “Socialism and Man”, that proletarian internationalism isn’t just a duty but a necessity. If revolutionary leaders forget this, Che wrote, the revolution will lose its inspiration and imperialism will benefit.

Che was also known for having severely criticized Soviet Union leadership for having lost its internationalism with the world’s proletariat and the Third World. Following up on Che’s critique, I find it important to criticize communist and socialist parties, and governments led by these parties, which let down people who are oppressed by, or invaded by, national or foreign powers.

Internationalism in action

1. Internationalists must support resistance fighters against invasions. Therefore, one must chastise political parties and groups that give political or moral support to those who call themselves the Iraq Communist Party as it is part of the Quisling government the USA terrorist state set in. ICP leaders live side by side the invaders in the Green Zone. That there are organizations in the United States, UK, Denmark and elsewhere, which call themselves communist or socialist parties and that cooperate with the world’s greatest terrorist state is incomprehensible, shameful, immoral and anti-internationalist.

2. The same applies to people who still support the Zionist state of Israel, which commits genocide against the Palestinian people. Millions of decent people have gotten together to support Palestinians in many ways, including Ships to Gaza. In Denmark, four groups of people have challenged the state’s terrorist laws by donating solidarity aid to the secular leftist PFLP which is part of the Palestinian resistance. Rebellion (Denmark), Fighters and Lovers, Horserød-Stuthoff Association (veterans of WWII resistance fighters imprisoned in Horserød and Stuthoff prisons), and TIB’s club (local carpenters near Copenhagen) have aided both PFLP and FARC, Colombian armed liberation movement.

3. Internationalist can not cooperate with US-NATO aggressive wars, which always have the goal of controlling that country’s economy and politics for capitalist profits. It is shameful that many experienced socialists and communists, as well as naïve progressive people, have backed up West’s big capitalist plans to take over Libya, and thus have bombed Libya back to the stone age. Denmark was one of only six countries that dropped tens of thousands of bombs on Libya, destroying much of it infrastructure, schools, hospitals…In fact, Denmark dropped more bombs on Libya than it has on any other country in its history, Afghanistan included. And the pilots were cowards as there was no resistance by Libya’s air force, already decimated.

This conflict has little to do with the Arab Spring movement. It is a conflict between internal war lords, with ordinary people involved who wished to increase democracy but who were misled by US-NATO whose forces seek to control Libya’s oil and avoid a gold-based currency that Gaddafi was promoting amongst all African countries. Now, US-NATO has placed a lackey government in Tripoli just as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq.

4. Internationalists must also criticize comrade governments, such as Cuba and ALBA governments in Latin America, when they make big mistakes regarding internationalism. We can’t be true comrades-solidarity activists by keeping our mouths shut when this occurs. Such is the case with their support of the brutal government of Sri Lanka, which practices genocide against the minority Tamil population. Ever since independence from Great Britain, in 1947, the majority Sinhalese governments and chauvinist Buddhist monk system has discriminated against Tamils. They have constantly been treated as second class citizens, their language and religions relegated to secondary status without national recognition. Even pogroms have been employed with the brutal murder of many thousands on various occasions. And since May 2009, following the end of a 26-year civil war, ethnic cleansing in the traditional Tamil homeland in the north and eastern areas is the rule of the day.

Cuba and ALBA have spoken only positively of their historic ties with the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), to which Sri Lanka is a member, but so are 130 other nations. One cannot, in the name of protecting each nation’s sovereignty, avoid critique when one or more of these nations oppresses or conducts pogroms and genocide against part of the population. Nor can we accept as an excuse the immoral geo-political game that nearly all governments of whatever color play.

We shall also criticize Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil and other Latin American progressive governments for helping the US and France in their ouster of the only decent and only democratically elected people’s president in Haiti’s history, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. These Latin American governments actually assist the US’s 2004 coup d´état against Aristide by placing occupying troops in the small country, seeking to dampen the people’s anger. These progressive governments should, instead, back up the people’s desire to bring their president back to state power, just as they sought to do for President Zelaya in Honduras where national capitalists and generals kicked him out of office, with background support once again by the United States government.

5. On the personal and organizational plain, internationalism operates when workers of a major firm ask people to boycott a product because of the mistreatment of the workers by the firm. This is the case with Coca-Cola whose workers in Colombia asked us to stop buying the “drink of the death squad” (David Rovics song), because it hires mercenaries to murder workers who seek to organize a union and struggle for collective bargaining. Workers in other countries, such as Guatemala, and farmers in India have asked the same.

It is with joy that I can state that here where we gather (carpenters’ hall in Valby, Denmark), this union is one of the few local unions and political or grass roots groups in Denmark that has boycotted Coca-Cola. This is something any and all individuals can do. It is just a soda drink. So drink something else. Boycotting Coca-Cola is just like boycotting all products from Israel and Sri Lanka. It is a simple act of solidarity, of internationalism.

Charlotte and I have just returned from a six week trip in India where two of my books (“Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka” and “Sounds of Venezuela”) were published by New Century Book House, Tamil Nadu. The Tamil book concerns the history and contemporary life of the Tamil people in that island-nation, and the need to act in solidarity with them. The Venezuela short book concerns this people’s efforts to create a better world for themselves and solidarity with all peoples. When people asked us where we are from we often replied that we are “internationalists”. Interestingly, many Indians understood our meaning and were pleased to think in terms of being brothers and sisters in the world.

This concept, and feeling, of brotherly love, of internationalism has taken off in a bigger way, in 2011, than in many decades. It started in Tunisia, and has expanded to the indignados in Spain, to the anti-capitalists in Wall Street and in hundreds of cities throughout the US and the West.

We have much to criticize and yet much to be glad for as 2012 opens. We must remember and appreciate those who set us off on this new anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist, non-violent and democratic revolution—from the martyr in Tunisia (street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi) and his Iraqi spiritual brother a bit earlier, shoe-thrower Muntazar al-Zaidi, to Occupy Wall Street protestors to Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and co-workers at Wikileaks, who helped spark it all by blowing the whistle on the war criminals. These modern-day Paris Commune resisters without arms—OWS and Occupy the World—are growing and they are presenting a vision and with it a program-in-discussion that must be studied and supported.

Internationalism is an endless struggle, an endless challenge. It does not end even when one or more of our political parties take over the governing reigns. We activists from the streets must always keep our wary eyes pinned on the leaders, regardless of their names, just as our clear eyes cast light upon humanity’s future.

In the modern capitalist era, the ideologies of imperialist rulers vary over time, from the early appeals to “the right” to wealth, power, colonies and grandeur to later claims of a ‘civilizing mission’. More recently imperial rulers have propagated, many diverse justifications adapted to specific contexts, adversaries, circumstances and audiences.

This essay will concentrate on analyzing contemporary US imperialist ideological arguments for legitimizing wars and sanctions to sustain dominance.

Contextualizing Imperial Ideology

Imperialist propaganda varies according to whether it is directed against a competitor for global power, or whether as a justification for applying sanctions, or engaging in open warfare against a local or regional socio-political adversary.

With regard to established imperialist (Europe) or rising world economic competitors (China), US imperialist propaganda varies over time. Early in the 19th century, Washington proclaimed the “Monroe Doctrine”, denouncing European efforts to colonize Latin America, privileging its own imperial designs in that region. In the 20th century when the US imperial policymakers were displacing Europe from prime resource based colonies in the Middle East and Africa, it played on several themes. It condemned ‘colonial forms of domination’ and promoted ‘neo-colonial’ transitions that ended European monopolies and facilitated US multi-national corporate penetration. This was clearly evident during and after World War 2, in the Middle East petrol-countries.

During the 1950s as the US assumed imperial primacy and radical anti-colonial nationalism came to the fore, Washington forged alliances with the declining colonial power to combat a common enemy and to prop up post-colonial powers to combat a common enemy. Even with the post-World War II economic recovery, growth and unification of Europe, it still works in tandem and under US leadership in militarily repressing nationalist insurgencies and regimes. When conflicts and competition occur, between US and European regimes, banks and enterprises, the mass media of each region publish “investigatory findings” highlighting the frauds and malfeasance of its competitors — and US regulatory agencies levy heavy fines on their European counterparts, overlooking similar practices by Wall Street financial firms.

In recent times the rising tide of militarist imperialism and colonial wars fueled by Israeli proxies in the US state has led to some serious divergencies between US and European imperialism. With the exception of England, Europe made a minimum symbolic commitment to the US wars and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Germany and France concentrated on expanding their export markets and economic capacities; displacing the US in major markets and resource sites. The convergence of US and European empires led to the integration of financial institutions and the subsequent common crises and collapse but without any coordinated policy of recovery. US ideologists propagated the idea of a “declining and decaying European Union”, while the European ideologues emphasized the failures of Anglo-American de-regulated, ‘free markets’ and Wall Street swindles.

Imperialist Ideology, Rising Economic Powers and Nationalist Challengers

There is a long history of imperialist “anti-imperialism”, officially sponsored condemnation, exposés and moral indignation directed exclusively against rival imperialists, emerging powers or simply competitors, who in some cases are simply following in the footsteps of the established imperial powers.

English imperialists in their heyday justified their world-wide plunder of three continents by perpetuating the “Black Legend”, of Spanish empire’s “exceptional cruelty” toward indigenous people of Latin America, while engaging in the biggest and most lucrative African slave trade. While the Spanish colonists enslaved the indigenous people, the Anglo-American settlers exterminated them.

In the run-up to World War II, European and US imperial powers, while exploiting their Asian colonies condemned Japanese imperial powers’ invasion and colonization of China. Japan, in turn claimed it was leading Asia’s forces fighting against Western imperialism and projected a post-colonial “co-prosperity” sphere of equal Asian partners.

The imperialist use of “anti-imperialist” moral rhetoric was designed to weaken rivals and was directed to several audiences. In fact, at no point did the anti-imperialist rhetoric serve to “liberate” any of the colonized people. In almost all cases the victorious imperial power only substituted one form colonial or neo-colonial rule for another.

The “anti-imperialism” of the imperialists is directed at the nationalist movements of the colonized countries and at their domestic public. British imperialists fomented uprisings among the agro-mining elites in Latin America promising “free trade” against Spanish mercantilist rule; they backed the “self-determination” of the slave-holding cotton plantation owners in the US South against the Union; they supported the territorial claims of the Iroquois tribal leaders against the US anti-colonial revolutionaries — exploiting legitimate grievances for imperial ends.

During World War II, the Japanese imperialists supported a sector of the nationalist, anti-colonial movement in India against the British Empire. The US condemned Spanish colonial rule in Cuba and the Philippines and went to war to “liberate” the oppressed peoples from tyranny and remained to impose a reign of terror, exploitation and colonial rule.

The imperialist powers sought to divide the anti-colonial movements and create future “client rulers” when and if they succeeded. The use of anti-imperialist rhetoric was designed to attract two sets of groups. A conservative group with common political and economic interests with the imperial power, which shared their hostility to revolutionary nationalists and which sought to accrue greater advantage by tying their fortunes to a rising imperial power. A radical sector of the movement tactically allied itself with the rising imperial power, with the idea of using the imperial power to secure resources (arms, propaganda, vehicles and financial aid) and, once securing power, to discard them. More often than not, in this game of mutual manipulation between empire and nationalists, the former won out, as is the case then and now.

The imperialist “anti-imperialist” rhetoric was equally directed at the domestic public, especially in countries like the US which prized its 18th anti-colonial heritage. The purpose was to broaden the base of empire building beyond the hard line empire loyalists, militarists and corporate beneficiaries. Their appeal sought to include liberals, humanitarians, progressive intellectuals, religious and secular moralists, and other “opinion-makers” who had a certain cachet with the larger public, the ones who would have to pay with their lives and tax money for the inter-imperial and colonial wars.

The official spokespeople of empire publicize real and fabricated atrocities of their imperial rivals, and highlight the plight of the colonized victims. The corporate elite and the hardline militarists demand military action to protect property, or to seize strategic resources; the humanitarians and progressives denounce the “crimes against humanity” and echo the calls “to do something concrete” to save the victims from genocide. Sectors of the Left join the chorus and, finding a sector of victims who fit in with their abstract ideology, plead for the imperial powers to “arm the people to liberate themselves” (sic). By lending moral support and a veneer of respectability to the imperial war, by swallowing the propaganda of “war to save victims” the progressives become the prototype of the “anti-imperialism of the fools”. Having secured broad public support on the bases of “anti-imperialism”, the imperialist powers feel free to sacrifice citizens’ lives and the public treasury, to pursue war, fueled by the moral fervor of a righteous cause. As the butchery drags on and the casualties mount, and the public wearies of war and its cost, progressive and leftist enthusiasm turns to silence or worse, moral hypocrisy with claims that “the nature of the war changed” or “that this isn’t the kind of war that we had in mind …” As if the war makers ever intended to consult the progressives and left on how and why they should engage in imperial wars!

In the contemporary period the imperial “anti-imperialist wars” and aggression have been greatly aided and abetted by well-funded “grass roots” so-called “non-governmental organizations” which act to mobilize popular movements which can “invite” imperial aggression.

Over the past four decades US imperialism has fomented at least two dozen “grass roots” movements which have destroyed democratic governments, or decimated collectivist welfare states or provoked major damage to the economy of targeted countries.

In Chile throughout 1972-73 under the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, the CIA financed and provided major support — via the AFL-CIO — to private truck owners to paralyze the flow of goods and services. They also funded a strike by a sector of the copper workers union (at the El Tenient mine) to undermine copper production and exports, in the lead up to the coup. After the military took power, several “grass roots” Christian Democratic union officials participated in the purge of elected leftist union activists. Needless to say, in short order the truck owners and copper workers ended the strike, dropped their demands and subsequently lost all bargaining rights!

In the 1980’s the CIA via Vatican channels transferred millions of dollars to sustain the “Solidarity Union” in Poland, making a hero of the Gdansk shipyards worker-leader Lech Walesa, who spearheaded the general strike to topple the Communist regime. With the overthrow of Communism so also went guaranteed employment, social security, and trade union militancy: the neo-liberal regimes reduced the workforce at Gdansk by fifty percent and eventually closed it, giving the boot to the entire workforce. Walesa retired with a magnificent Presidential pension, while his former workmates walked the streets and the new “independent” Polish rulers provided NATO with military bases and mercenaries for imperial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In 2002 the White House, the CIA, the AFL-CIO and NGOs, backed a Venezuelan military-business — trade-union bureaucrat-led “grass roots” coup that overthrew democratically elected President Chavez. In 48 hours, a million strong authentic grass roots mobilization of the urban poor backed by constitutionalist military forces defeated the US backed dictators and restored Chavez to power. Subsequently, oil executives directed a lockout backed by several US-financed NGOs. They were defeated by the workers’ takeover of the oil industry. The unsuccessful coup and lockout cost the Venezuelan economy billions of dollars in lost income and caused a double digit decline in GNP.

The US backed “grass roots” armed jihadists to liberated “Bosnia” and armed the “grass roots” terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army to break-up Yugoslavia. Almost the entire Western Left cheered as, the US bombed Belgrade, degraded the economy and claimed it was “responding to genocide”. Kosovo “free and independent” became a huge market for white slavers, housed the biggest US military base in Europe, with the highest per-capita out migration of any country in Europe.

The imperialist “grass roots” strategy combines humanitarian, democratic, and anti-imperialist rhetoric and paid and trained local NGOs, with mass media blitzes to mobilize Western public opinion and especially “prestigious leftist moral critics” behind their power grabs.

The Consequence of Imperial Promoted “Anti-Imperialist” Movements: Who Wins and Who Loses?

The historic record of imperialist promoted “anti-imperialist” and “pro-democracy” “grass roots movements” is uniformly negative. Let us briefly summarize the results. In Chile ‘grass roots’ truck owners strike led to the brutal military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and nearly two decades of torture, murder, jailing and forced exile of hundreds of thousands, the imposition of brutal “free market policies” and subordination to US imperial policies. In summary, the US multi-national copper corporations and the Chilean oligarchy were the big winners and the mass of the working class and urban and rural poor the biggest losers. The US backed “grass roots uprisings” in Eastern Europe against Soviet domination, exchanged Russian for US domination; subordination to NATO instead of the Warsaw Pact; the massive transfer of national public enterprises, banks and media to Western multi-nationals. Privatization of national enterprises led to unprecedented levels of double-digit unemployment, skyrocketing rents and the growth of pensioner poverty. The crises induced the flight of millions of the most educated and skilled workers and the elimination of free public health, higher education and worker vacation resorts.

Throughout the now capitalist Eastern Europe and USSR highly organized criminal gangs developed large scale prostitution and drug rings; foreign and local gangster ‘entrepeneurs’ seized lucrative public enterprises and formed a new class of super-rich oligarchs Electoral party politicians, local business people and professionals linked to Western ‘partners’ were the socio-economic winners. Pensioners, workers, collective farmers, the unemployed youth were the big losers along with the formerly subsidized cultural artists. Military bases in Eastern Europe became the empire’s first line of military attack of Russia and the target of any counter-attack.

If we measure the consequences of the shift in imperialist power, it is clear that the Eastern Europe countries have become even more subservient under the US and the EU than under Russia. Western induced financial crises have devastated their economies; Eastern European troops have served in more imperialist wars under NATO than under Soviet rule; the cultural media are under Western commercial control. Most of all, the degree of imperialist control over all economic sectors far exceeds anything that existed under the Soviets. The Eastern European “grass roots” movement succeeded in deepening and extending the US Empire; the advocates of peace, social justice, national independence, a cultural renaissance and social welfare with democracy were the big losers.

Western liberals, progressives and leftists who fell in love with imperialist-promoted “anti-imperialism” are also big losers. Their support for the NATO attack on Yugoslavia led to the break-up of a multi-national state and the creation of huge NATO military bases and a white slavers paradise in Kosova. Their blind support for the imperial promoted “liberation” of Eastern Europe devastated the welfare state, eliminating the pressure on Western regimes’ need to compete in providing welfare provisions. The main beneficiaries of Western imperial advances via “grass roots” uprisings were the multi-national corporations, the Pentagon and the right-wing free market neo-liberals. As the entire political spectrum moved to the right, a sector of the left and progressives eventually jumped on the bandwagon. The Left moralists lost credibility and support, their peace movements dwindled, and their “moral critiques” lost resonance. The left and progressives who tail-ended the imperial backed “grass roots movements”, whether in the name of “anti-Stalinism”, “pro-democracy”, or “anti-imperialism” have never engaged in any critical reflection; no effort to analyze the long-term negative consequences of their positions in terms of the losses in social welfare, national independence or personal dignity.

The long history of imperialist manipulation of “anti-imperialist” narratives has found virulent expression in the present day. The New Cold War launched by Obama against China and Russia, the hot war brewing in the Gulf over Iran’s alleged military threat, the interventionist threat against Venezuela’s “drug-networks”, and Syria’s “bloodbath” are part and parcel of the use and abuse of “anti-imperialism” to prop up a declining empire. Hopefully, the progressive and leftist writers and scribes will learn from the ideological pitfalls of the past and resist the temptation to access the mass media by providing a ‘progressive cover’ to imperial dubbed “rebels”. It is time to distinguish between genuine anti-imperialism and pro-democracy movements and those promoted by Washington, NATO, and the mass media.

1. Ideology.  The dynamic that exists between management and labor hasn’t changed since the Industrial Revolution.  Despite those catchy slogans about “synergy” and “team-building,” people who earn a wage and people who pay a wage don’t necessarily want the same thing. They want different things, divergent things.  One wants a larger slice of the pie for themselves and their families, the other wants to keep the whole pie.  Hence, workers collectives.

2. Numbers.  Despite the hand-wringing over declining union rolls, there are still (as of 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics) 14.7 million union members in the country.  That’s twice the population of Israel.  On November 15, 1969, when an estimated 500,000 people participated in an anti-war demonstration in Washington, D.C., it was billed as a historical turnout.  Think what 14 million could do if mobilized.

3. Citizens.  Those “heroic” workers in the community—cops, firemen and nurses—are going to step up to the plate and remind the public that unions aren’t the horrible monsters the Koch brothers and Mitch McConnell wing of the Republican Party make them out to be.  They’re our neighbors, our friends, our benefactors.  Demonizing the firefighters and nurses is a tactic that’s guaranteed to backfire.

4. Exposure.  The drive to privatize public schools will fail. In fact, those grandiose promises about how brilliantly for-profit charter schools are going to perform, and how charter schools will be the educational template for the future, have already been exposed as false.  Make no mistake:  privatizing the public schools wasn’t undertaken to help America’s students; it was undertaken to make money for a few early-entry entrepreneurs.

5. Politics.  Obama will win re-election (Get serious.  Who’s going to beat him….Romney?) and, as a lame duck president with nothing to lose, Obama will surprise and delight his earlier detractors by making the “Reinvigoration of American Labor” the centerpiece of his second term, proving that those inspirational promises he made on the campaign trail in 2008 weren’t just empty rhetoric.

6. Merger.  Without a clear agenda or recognized leadership, the Occupy Wall Street movement will fizzle out.  The volunteers who fueled that noble experiment will come to the realization that the only institutional opposition to corporate America is organized labor.  The OWS faithful will embrace the AFL-CIO, and together they will go on the warpath. A coalition made in Heaven.

7. Opportunity.  Fast food and retail workers will be the target of the next big membership drive.  Not only are these workers underpaid, underappreciated, and fed up with being marginalized, the jobs they’re doing just happen to be jobs that can’t be shipped to another state or overseas, so those tired old management threats can’t be used against them.  They’re ripe for organizing.

8. Patriotism.  America will inevitably realize that, unlike Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs, union members are our true patriots.  Union workers not only earn every nickel in these United States, they spend every nickel here as well.  Unlike “situational capitalists,” America’s unions don’t root for the success of foreign economies (to the detriment of our own).

9. Culture.  Conservative Republicans will wake up and realize that, across the board, union members tend to be fairly moderate when it comes to social and cultural issues.  Despite being linked to the Democratic Party, organized labor isn’t the radical, godless hotbed the evangelical right pretends it is.  That phony liberal stigma will collapse like a house of cards.

10. Money.  This time around, labor will take the reported $400 million it spent on getting Obama elected in 2008, and spend it all on congressional and senatorial races, winning decisive majorities in both chambers, gaining chairmanships of all the committees, and eliminating the threat of Republican filibusters.

And that’s how labor will get its groove back.

Many of the major institutions and economic relations which were cause and consequence of world and regional capitalist expansion over the past three decades are in the process of disintegration and disarray. The previous economic engines of global expansion, the US and the European Union, have exhausted their potentialities and are in open decline. The new centers of growth, China, India, Brazil, Russia, which for a ‘short decade’ provided a new impetus for world growth have run their course and are de-accelerating rapidly and will continue to do so throughout the new year.

The Collapse of the European Union

Specifically, the crises-wracked European Union will break up and the de facto multi-tiered structure will turn into a series of bilateral/multi-lateral trade and investment agreements. Germany, France, the Low and Nordic countries will attempt to weather the downturn. England – namely the City of London, in splendid isolation, will sink into negative growth, its financiers scrambling to find new speculative opportunities among the Gulf petrol-states and other ‘niches’. Eastern and Central Europe, particularly Poland and the Czech Republic, will deepen their ties to Germany but will suffer the consequences of the general decline of world markets. Southern Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy) will enter into a deep depression as the massive debt payments fueled by savage assaults on wages and social benefits will severely reduce consumer demand.

Depression level unemployment and under-employment running to one-third of the labor force will detonate year-long social conflicts, intensifying into popular uprisings. Eventually a break-up of the European Union is almost inevitable. The euro as a currency of choice will be replaced by or return to national issues accompanied by devaluations and protectionism. Nationalism will be the order of the day. Banks in Germany, France and Switzerland will suffer huge losses on their loans to the South. Major bailouts will become necessary, polarizing German and French societies, between the tax-paying majorities and the bankers. Trade union militancy and rightwing pseudo-‘populism’ (neo-fascism) will intensify the class and national struggles.

A depressed, fragmented and polarized Europe will be less likely to join in any Zionist inspired US-Israeli military adventure against Iran (or even Syria). Crisis ridden Europe will oppose Washington’s confrontationalist approach to Russia and China.

The US: The Recession Returns with a Vengeance

The US economy will suffer the consequences of its ballooning fiscal deficit and will not be able to spend its way out of the world recession of 2012. Nor can it count on ‘exporting’ its way out of negative growth by turning to previously dynamic Asia, as China, India, and the rest of Asia are losing economic steam. China will grow far below its 9% moving average. India will decline from 8% to 5% or lower. Moreover, the Obama regime’s military policy of ‘encirclement’, its economic policy of exclusion and protectionism will preclude any new stimulus from China.

Militarism Exacerbates the Economic Downturn

The US and England will be the biggest losers from the Iraqi post war economic reconstruction. Of $186 billion dollars in infrastructure projects, US and UK corporations will gain less than 5% (Financial Times, 12/16/11, p 1 and 3). A similar outcome is likely in Libya and elsewhere. US imperial militarism destroys an adversary, plunging into debt to do so, and non-belligerents reap the lucrative post-war economic reconstruction contracts.

The US economy will fall into recession in 2012, and the “jobless recovery of 2011” will be replaced by a steep increase of unemployment in 2012. In fact, the entire labor force will shrink as people losing their unemployment benefits will fail to register.

Labor exploitation (“productivity”) will intensify as capitalists force workers to produce more, for less pay, thus widening the income gap between wages and profits.

The economic downturn and growth of unemployment will be accompanied by savage cuts in social programs to subsidize financially troubled banks and industries. The debates among the parties will be over how large the cuts to workers and retirees will be to secure the ‘confidence’ of the bondholders. Faced with equally limited political choices, the electorate will react by voting out incumbents, abstaining and via spontaneous and organized mass movements, such as the “occupy Wall Street” protest. Dissatisfaction, hostility, and frustration will pervade the culture. Democratic Party demagogues will scapegoat China; the Republican Party demagogues will blame the immigrants. Both will fulminate against “the Islamo-fascists” and especially against Iran.

New Wars in the Midst of Crises: Zionists Pull the Trigger

The “52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations” and their “Israel First” followers in the US Congress, State Department, Treasury, and the Pentagon will push for war with Iran. If they are successful it will result in a regional conflagration and world depression. Given the extremist Israeli regime’s success in securing blind obedience to its war policies from the US Congress and White House, any doubts about the real possibility of a major catastrophic outcome can be set aside.

China: Compensatory Mechanisms in 2012

China will face the global recession of 2012 with several possibilities of ameliorating its impact. Beijing can shift toward producing goods and services for the 700 million domestic consumers currently out of the economic loop. By increasing wages, social services, and environmental safety, China can compensate for the loss of overseas markets. China’s economic growth, which is largely dependent on real estate speculation, will be adversely affected when the bubble is burst. A sharp downturn will result, leading to job losses, municipal bankruptcies and increased social and class conflicts. This can result in either greater repression or gradual democratization. The outcome will profoundly affect China’s market-state relations. The economic crisis will likely strengthen state control over the market.

Russia Faces the Crisis

Russia’s election of President Putin will lead to less collaboration in backing US promoted uprisings and sanctions against Russian allies and trading partners. Putin will turn toward greater ties with China and will benefit from the break-up of the EU and the weakening of NATO.

The western media backed opposition will use its financial clout to erode Putin’s image and encourage investment boycotts though they will lose the Presidential elections by a big margin. The world recession will weaken the Russian economy and will force it to choose between greater public ownership or greater dependency on state funds to bail out prominent oligarchs.

The Transition 2011-2012: From Regional Stagnation and Recession to World Crises

The year 2011 laid the groundwork for the breakdown of the European Union. The crises began with the demise of the Euro, stagnation in the US and the outbreak of mass protests against the obscene inequalities on a world scale. The events of 2011 were a dress rehearsal for a new year of full scale trade wars between major powers, sharpening inter-imperialist struggles and the likelihood of popular rebellions turning into revolutions. Moreover, the escalation of Zionist-orchestrated war fever against Iran in 2011 promises the biggest regional war since the US-Indo-Chinese conflict. The electoral campaigns and outcomes of Presidential elections in the US, Russia and France will deepen the global conflicts and economic crises.

During 2011 the Obama regime announced a policy of military confrontation with Russia and China and policies designed to undermine and degrade China’s rise as a world economic power. In the face of a deepening economic recession and with the decline of overseas markets, especially in Europe, a major trade war will unfold. Washington will aggressively pursue policies limiting Chinese exports and investments. The White House will escalate its efforts to disrupt China’s trade and investments in Asia, Africa and elsewhere. We can expect greater US efforts to exploit China’s internal ethnic and popular conflicts and to increase its military presence off China’s coastline. A major provocation or fabricated incident in this context is not to be excluded. The result in 2012 could lead to rabid chauvinist calls for a costly new ‘Cold War’. Obama has provided the framework and justification for a large-scale, long-term confrontation with China. This will be seen as a desperate effort to prop up US influence and strategic positions in Asia. The US military “quadrangle of power” – US-Japan-Australia-South Korea – with satellite support from the Philippines, will pit China’s market ties against Washington’s military build-up.

Europe: Deeper Austerity and Intensified Class Struggle

The austerity programs imposed in Europe, from England to Latvia to southern Europe will really take hold in 2012. Massive public sector firings and reduced private sector salaries and job opportunities will lead to a year of permanent class warfare and regime challenges. The ‘austerity policies’ in the South, will be accompanied by debt defaults resulting in bank failures in France and Germany. England’s financial ruling class, isolated from Europe, but dominant in England, will insist that the Conservatives ‘repress’ labor and popular unrest. A new tough neo-Thatcherite style of autocratic rule will emerge; the Labor-trade union opposition will issue empty protests and tighten the leash on the rebellious populace. In a word, the regressive socio-economic policies put in place in 2011 have set the stage for new police-state regimes and more acute and possibly bloody confrontations with workers and unemployed youth with no future.

The Coming Wars that End America “As We Know It”

Within the US, Obama has laid the groundwork for a new and bigger war in the Middle East by relocating troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and concentrating them against Iran. To undermine Iran, Washington is expanding clandestine military and civilian operations against Iranian allies in Syria, Pakistan, Venezuela, and China. The key to the US and Israeli bellicose strategy toward Iran is a series of wars in neighboring states, worldwide economic sanctions, cyber-attacks aimed at disabling vital industries, and clandestine terrorist assassinations of scientists and military officials. The entire push, planning, and execution of the US policies leading up to war with Iran can be empirically and without a doubt attributed to the Zionist power configuration occupying strategic positions in the US Administration, mass media and ‘civil society’. A systematic analysis of American policymakers designing and implementing economic sanctions policy in Congress finds prominent roles for such mega-Zionists (Israel-Firsters) as Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Howard Berman, Dennis Ross in the White House, Jeffrey Feltman in the State Department, and Stuart Levy, and his replacement David Cohen, in the Treasury. The White House is totally beholden to Zionist fund raisers and takes its cue from the 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organization.

The Israeli-Zionist strategy is to encircle Iran, weaken it economically and attack its military. The Iraq invasion was the US’s first war for Israel; the Libyan war the second; the current proxy war against Syria is the third. These wars have destroyed Israel’s adversaries or are in the process of doing so. During 2011, economic sanctions, which were designed to create domestic discontent in Iran, were the principle weapon of choice. The global sanctions campaign engaged the entire energies of the major Jewish-Zionist lobbies. They have faced no opposition from the mass media, Congress or the White Office. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) has been virtually exempt from criticism by any of the progressive, leftist and socialist journals, movements or grouplets – with a few notable exceptions.

The past year’s re-positioning of US troops from Iraq to the borders of Iran, the sanctions and the rising Big Push from Israel’s Fifth Column in the US means expanded war in the Middle East. This likely means a “surprise” aerial and maritime missile attack by US forces. This will be based on a concocted pretext of an “imminent nuclear attack” concocted by Israeli Mossad and faithfully transmitted by the ZPC to their lackeys US Congress and White House for consumption and transmission to the world. It will be a destructive, bloody, prolonged war for Israel; the US will bear the direct military cost by itself and the rest of the world will pay a dear economic price. The Zionist-promoted US war will convert the recession of early 2012 into a major depression by the end of the year and probably provoke mass upheavals.

Conclusion

All indications point to 2012 being a turning point year of unrelenting economic crisis spreading outward from Europe and the US to Asia and its dependencies in Africa and Latin America. The crisis will be truly global. Inter-imperial confrontations and colonial wars will undermine any efforts to ameliorate this crisis. In response, mass movements will emerge moving over time from protests and rebellions, and hopefully to social revolutions and political power.

Indeed, stalling has become their weapon of choice. Through the use of convoluted legalistic maneuvers, companies have been known to postpone union elections for months, even years, after employees have signed cards saying they wished to vote. Stories of management obstructionism are legion. A good example of an obstructionist campaign is California’s central valley growers’ response to the relatively new UFW (United Farm Workers), back in the 1970s.

The first thing the growers did was challenge the eligibility of every voter. Nothing wrong with that; nothing wrong with making sure everything is kosher when you’re conducting an election. But management was aware that many of these pickers were migrants and transients, that many of them lived in work camps and makeshift compounds strewn all over the valley, and that verifying every single voter’s legal residence was going to be a tedious and time-consuming process. But tedious and time-consuming was precisely what the growers hoped for.

After voter eligibility was confirmed, they began their sabotage campaign. Knowing that Mexicans are Roman Catholics, and that these honest, hard-working rural folk were socially conservative, they inundated them with virulent anti-union propaganda, claiming that organized labor’s connection to the Democratic Party meant that their monthly union dues would be spent on building more abortion clinics, legalizing drugs and prostitution, and promoting homosexual marriages.

Is that where you want your hard-earned union dues to go?! they asked. To kill babies?! To encourage two men to become husband and wife?! The growers terrorized these decent, unsophisticated people with cultural horror stories. Nasty business. On the other hand, in the view of the professional union-busters hired by the companies, it was all in a day’s work.

As to the NLRB’s latest decision, there is no way management is going to go quietly into the night—not on rule changes that give labor more flexibility. This NLRB ruling is far from over. Union-management disputes at this altitude aren’t like sporting events, where the losing team, disappointed as may be, crosses the field and exchanges gentlemanly handshakes with the winners.

Here’s the response from Katherine Lugar, EVP for public affairs at the Retail Industry Leaders Association: “This decision erodes employers’ free speech and due process rights and opens the door to rushed elections that will deny employees access to critical information.” Not only have business groups already portrayed the modest rule changes as a violation of the Bill of Rights and the 14th amendment, but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (the biggest lobbying group in the world, incidentally) has filed a federal lawsuit to prevent implementation.

In truth, the final draft isn’t that radical. Basically, it boils down to prohibiting the company from engaging in frivolous stalling tactics—tactics that would be immediately obvious to any pilgrim who took the time to examine them—and giving the employees a fair shot at voting in a timely manner. The new rules are scheduled to take effect April 30, 2012.

A provision in one of the earlier drafts—requiring the company to supply the union with employees’ e-mails and phone numbers—was removed from the final version. Business groups insisted it was purely a question of privacy, that while giving out mailing addresses was acceptable, supplying e-mails and phone numbers (even in this Electronic Age) was a violation of the U.S. constitution. And they said that with a straight face.

The next day, the self-immolation was confirmed as a suicide: Lise Bonnafous had died from the third-degree burns that covered 95% of her body. So ended the life of this 44-year-old teacher who had been working for ten years at the Jean-Moulin Lycée at Béziers, one of the largest in the Languedoc-Roussillon region.

In a carefully worded statement the 280 teachers at the lycée declared: “This symbolic act has left us reeling and has caused us all much heart-searching (‘nous interroge tous’). This gesture is a call to solidarity for the entire staff and bears witness to the difficulty we have in accomplishing our mission.”

Teaching at the lycée was suspended as staff and students attempted to come to terms with this gruesome event. The teaching staff declared a strike of indefinite duration until responsibility for the tragedy could be established. The French teaching union SNES called for a “debate” concerning the tragedy and pressed the ministry of education for “an improvement in the general conditions of work for teachers, which have become considerably more demanding in the last few years”. Another union, SNALC, said that the suicide points to “an immense malaise in the entire profession”. The unions organised a “white march” (“marche blanche”) in Béziers on 18 October and a further march in Montpellier the following day.

Officials were quick to portray the suicide as the isolated act of a mentally unstable teacher. The French minister of education, Luc Chatel, referred to her “psychologically fragile state” and said that she had been receiving “pedagogical and medical treatment”. However, this claim is denied by colleagues: “Luc Chatel is lying, she was not being treated medically nor was she fragile, but she was conscientious, competent, she loved her work, and she had courage,” said a colleague, a certain F. Peru. Other colleagues pointed out that teachers generally have been reduced to a “fragile” state because of a steady deterioration in their conditions of work.

In any case, this was no ordinary suicide: rather, a symbolic act of self-immolation with all the horrifying impact on those involved, especially the eye witnesses. But even if one may deplore this self-inflicted violence and the trauma it has caused, one cannot ignore the context in which such an extreme act was carried out. Indeed, some of her colleagues regard her as a hero, and admire her for paying the supreme sacrifice in order to draw attention to the problems within the French education system. Morale among French teachers is after all low, as teachers are contending with a number of problems simultaneously, including government cuts, “reforms” (widely suspected as money-saving ploys) and increasingly disruptive behaviour on the part of students.

In the 2011 budget, 16,000 lycée posts are scheduled to disappear out of a total of 850,000 teachers. The increased class size (40 or more) is making effective teaching more difficult and also adding to the marking load for each teacher. The cuts are perceived as all the more perverse because they do not correspond to a decrease in the number of students.

Teachers feel abandoned and misunderstood, that they are not being listened to. They say that recent “reforms” have been introduced without their views being taken sufficiently into account. One symptom of this is that the one-year teacher-training course, in which students taught half-time and spent the rest of the time in training – has been abolished: from now on young teachers will be forced to face the classroom for the first time with almost no preparation. Instead, the trainees are obliged to attend a few “training sessions” throughout the year. Exactly what is taught in these sessions has emerged in a report about one such session held in Bordeaux on 3 December last year. Trainees were lectured on their rights and duties as civil servants – but were not given any actual training on classroom teaching. Instead, they “benefited” from a talk in which two army officers tried to persuade trainees to steer their students towards a career in the army!¹  “If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one of them would remain in the army,” said Frederick the Great. Towards what career is the French government trying steer its students, if not a military one?

Disruptive behaviour in the classroom is another concern, pointing to problems within society at large. Sometimes this leads to assaults on teachers, which are on the increase. The FNEC FP-FO teaching union links the increase in violence and incivility to the suppression of teaching posts and CPEs (a team of administrators responsible for disciplinary matters): more than 60,000 positions abolished since 2007. If the recent changes have a negative effect on student behaviour or performance, the cuts will have turned out to be a false economy.

The attempt to instil martial virtues is not the only example of insensitivity on the part of the educational authorities. Bad feeling has also been caused by the increase in bonuses paid to the rectors of education academies (the regional bodies responsible for implementing national education policy) at a time when less money is being allocated for teaching. In fact bonuses are a normal part of the benefits package of France’s top civil servants. In this case, however, the bonuses were doubly outrageous: first, they were being awarded to proviseurs in proportion to the number of posts or institutions they were able to abolish; second, for 2011 the bonus had been increased from 19,000 to 22,000 euros – money that could have been used to help pay the somewhat meagre salary of teachers. The issue of bonuses was highlighted when a retired lycée director, Michel Ascher, an officer in the order of “Palmes Académiques”, handed back his decoration in protest. In an open letter dated 22 December 2010 he publicly lambasted the French educational system as being concerned exclusively with money. Other holders of the same distinction quickly followed suit.

A sign that teaching resources are being stretched is that the rules governing the conditions under which teachers are supposed to work are being flouted. Several teachers have been assigned classes in schools from 35 to as many as 66 kilometres apart, even though the rules clearly state that the teacher may be asked to teach only in the same town or in a neighbouring one. This immediately creates extra work in terms of commuting and multiplication of meetings with staff and parents. Of course, a teacher has the right – after a months-long appeal process – to refuse these extra demands, but at a price. The proviseurs (lycée directors) wield a lot of power. They can put pressure on you to teach another subject instead of paying someone else who is qualified to do it; they can assign you to larger classes if you exercise your right to refuse to work more than two supplementary hours; or they can simply order you to teach those extra hours.

Other “reforms” are in the pipeline. A proposed new law would change the way lycées are inspected. Instead of the current independent inspectorate, the task of inspecting would fall to the directorate of the lycée itself. Apart from the fact that the work schedules of proviseurs and vice-proviseurs are already stretched, the proposal almost guarantees that the process will be carried out in a perfunctory way at best. At worst, favouritism, or the suspicion of favouritism, is an obvious danger, not to mention conflict of interest and lack of impartiality. Such a measure merely reinforces the suspicion among teachers that the so-called “reforms” are a thin disguise for money-saving ploys.

On suspects too that Sarkozy is playing to popular discontent with civil servants, the category to which lycée teachers belong. French bureaucracy is cumbersome and expensive, and civil servants are often seen as lazy, overpaid and over-protected. Anything that would bring their pay and conditions into line with the private sector is seen by many as a good thing. However, while it is true that some civil servants are well paid, this is not the case with most lycée teachers. Teachers face the added problem of a restrictive work schedule: whereas most workers can take time off then they please, teachers are obliged to turn up for the classes and cannot change their schedule. The stereotype of feather-bedded bureaucrats does not apply to teachers.

Secondly, Sarkozy wants to go one better than the private sector: in an effort to cut down on absenteeism, it is being proposed that civil servants forfeit one day’s pay for each period of sick leave. Apart from the measure’s obvious unfairness in criminalizing illness, it could have the reverse effect to the one intended: workers who are genuinely sick the first day could well decide to take a second or even a third day off in addition, even if they are not sick, just to get their “money’s worth”.

France is generally viewed as a “worker-friendly” country where employees receive generous social benefits and can be sacked only with difficulty. The reality, however, is that unhappiness at the workplace is a major problem in France. (It was probably a factor behind the recent strikes against pension reforms.) Renault was hit by a spate of workplace suicides a few years ago. France Telecom lost a staggering 58 of its employees to suicide within three years. In a grim premonition of the Lise Bonnafous case, one worker killed himself by setting himself on fire. Another “model” in the Bonnafous case could have been street vendor’s suicide that sparked off the revolution in Tunisia.

Both Renault and France Telecom were facing difficulties at the time the suicides occurred, and low morale would have been an issue even under the best management. In the specific case of France Telecom, it has been alleged that there was a policy of attempting to reduce staff without resorting to redundancies.[8] The suspicion must be that, precisely because redundancy is such a laborious and expensive process in France, in certain cases employers are resorting to ruthless tactics to slim down their workforce: making life hell for their employees in the hope that they will leave – unless, that is, they commit suicide first.

In the case of the French education system, however, the likely culprit is incompetence and lack of imagination rather than ruthless pursuit of profit. However you view the causes, Lise Bonnafous’s is by no means the first suicide among teachers: recent cases include a school director in July, two teachers in June, and in August a young trainee who had been dismissed. According to a study by Inserm (a public research institute) dating from 2002, the suicide rate among teachers in the national education system is unusually high, at 39 per 100,000 per year.

French teachers are hoping their educational system will not become another France Telecom.

1. “Des militaires pour former les profs stagiaires”, www.rue89.com/2010/12/15/des-militaires-pour-former-les-profs-stagiaires-180932, based on an eye-witness account given to a representative of the SNES of Lot-et-a-Garonne