The Ghost of Times Past

by Stephen Fleischman

A spectre is haunting America—the spectre of Taft-Hartley.

The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, otherwise known as The Labor-Management Relations Act, became law in the Truman Administration after World War II, restricting the power of labor unions and clobbering the working class.

During the war, labor had won many victories, achieving higher wages, better working conditions, health benefits and pension plans. Even women were working in defense industries. Remember “Rosie the riveter”?

A real “labor movement” was built in the United States, with the strengthening of the AFL and the creation of the CIO. It contributed to the broadening of the middle class. The workers were winning a round in the class struggle.

Labor’s standing was uplifted a decade earlier, in the depth of The Great Depression, when a Senator from New York ushered a bill through Congress that became known as the Wagner Act, officially the National Labor Relations Act, and created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to act on labor matters.

The Act protected the rights of workers in the private sector, establishing the legality to organize labor unions, to engage in collective bargaining, and to take part in strikes and other forms of concerted activities in support of their demands. It was the best thing that had happened to labor in a long time, tending to level the playing field and allowing for a more equitable distribution of wealth. Workers gained the purchasing power with which to buy the products they produced. It kept the economy afloat.

The NLRB was given the power to investigate and decide on charges of unfair labor practices and to conduct elections in which workers would have the opportunity to decide whether they wanted to be represented by a union. The government was on the side of the people, for a change.

Then, Taft-Hartley hit—a McCarthy period bill sponsored by Republican right-wingers, Senator Robert Taft and Rep. Fred Hartley. Taft-Hartley was designed to put labor back in its hole. It was enacted by Congress, overriding President Truman’s veto. Labor leaders called it the “slave-labor bill”. It pulled the teeth and tore the claws out of the Wagner Act.

Corporate power went on a crusade to crush the organized labor movement in this country. Taft-Hartley was the weapon.

According to the Wall Street Journal they succeeded nicely, “In the US, just 7.5% of private-sector workers are union members.” (8-22-08 A11) Now, the economy is down in the hole with the work force.

Instead of building on our industrial and manufacturing base, our greedy and grave-digging capitalists have off-shored their plants and out-sourced our jobs to places where labor costs are lowest; where profits are the only thing that matters. A race to the bottom. We are now importing the products our own workers should be producing.

If you didn’t know we’ve been in a recession for over a year, you haven’t been paying attention. The economic collapse facing this country is spreading world-wide.

“We are experiencing an unprecedented economic crisis that has to be dealt with and dealt with rapidly,” Obama told reporters on Friday (1-23-09) as he met with lawmakers at the White House. He’s trying to get a stimulus package of around $825 billion out of Congress by mid-February. He thinks he can rescue the economy by throwing money at it. The Republicans, of course, want tax cuts.

The first thing Obama should do is get Congress to repeal Taft-Hartley and it wouldn’t cost him a dime. If he could help revive the union movement he might get some higher wages in the hands of the working class and create some purchasing power.

The second thing he should do is get the Employee Free Choice Act through Congress. Under the Act, the NLRB would recognize a union’s role as an official bargaining agent if a majority of employees authorized representation via a card check (signing a card stipulating their preference), without requiring the cumbersome secret ballot election that has cracked many a union when the employer has purposely tied it up in bureaucratic red tape.

The Employee Free Choice bill got through the House in 2007 and had majority support in the Senate, but was never voted on due to a Republican-led filibuster. President Obama has expressed his support of the measure.

The third thing President Obama should do is make “close shop” and “union shop” mandatory for all infrastructure projects financed by the current stimulus package. Encourage collective bargaining and strengthen the unions. That’s been a long-standing tradition on government financed jobs.

The fourth thing the President should do is to make bread and milk free to all families with children living below the poverty line.

It would show that the President cares about people.

What he does with the rest of the 825 Billion dollar stimulus package may help the economy in the short term.

Foreign Entanglements

by Stephen Fleischman

In this season of farewell addresses and inaugurals, it would be a good time to remember the famous farewell address of George Washington.

Although the advice Washington gave to the fledging nation was “beware of foreign entanglements”, he did not used those particular four words in his farewell address. This may be a shock to many who keep quoting him mistakenly.

But there is no doubt about what he meant.

“The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest,” said George.

Well, it seems by George Washington’s definition, the United States, today, is a slave nation. We have an “habitual hatred” of Iran and an “habitual fondness” for Israel. Couldn’t be clearer.

George went on to say, “A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.”

Did he mean Israel and the United States? Of course not. Israel didn’t exist then. But maybe old George was prescient? Sounds to me like he’s describing what’s been happening in Gaza the last three weeks.

We certainly have been facilitating Israel’s massacre of the people of Gaza by supplying much of the weaponry they have been using and we’ve been helping them out at the United Nations Security Council.

When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert can pick up a phone and call George W. Bush, and tell him how to vote on a UN resolution, you know this country is still a slave state. Olmert did so order Bush how to vote on a cease-fire resolution on Gaza. Bush obeyed and told Condoleezza Rice, his Secretary of State, to abstain from voting on the very resolution that she helped draft. Now that’s going beyond Chutzpah!

George Washington, in his farewell address, goes on to talk about politicians, those “deluded citizens who devote themselves to the favored nation.” It gives them, he says, “the facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium, sometimes even with popularity… a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption or infatuation.”

Was he talking about the Bush Administration or the neo-cons at the Pentagon?

George continues his farewell address with some more advice for us. “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible.”

How about military connection? George doesn’t say much about that. I would say it is an “entanglement”.

It is estimated that we have about 751 military bases in about 130 countries, not counting those we have in the two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, where presumptive wars rage. No one can quite precisely pin down who the enemy is or tell us what “victory” would consist of but that doesn’t seem to matter as American soldiers continue to die (over 4000, now) and taxpayer dollars flood out at the rate of about $12 billion a month. When asked what the reason for it is, the government should tell us the truth—profits.

War criminals Dick Cheney and George Bush seem to be about to fly the coop scot-free, but they have their albatrosses around their necks and they never know when the occasion might arise when they will come up and bite them.

Perhaps President-Elect Barack Obama needs a strong perfected warning concerning his aggravated criminal liability for any murders committed either by US military forces or by client states after he assumes office on January 20th.

By some counts, Obama is already a war criminal by vice of his actions in the Senate supporting US aggression against Afghanistan and funding for the occupation of Iraq, to mention two. Unless Obama radically changes course on a dime, there will be a qualitative moment, probably on Tuesday the way things are going now, when the first victim is wantonly slain by US forces a moment after he becomes Commander in Chief. The mantle of war criminal will come fluttering down upon his shoulders as he joins his predecessors waiting for the albatross to bite.

The fact that Obama has surrounded himself with such notorious war-mongers as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emanuel, and has kept on Bush’s Secretary of War, Robert Gates, shows the overwhelming probability that he will fecklessly disregard any lawful warning, however cogent.

A final piece of advice; perhaps meant for an Obama obeisant to Israel by a prescient George Washington:

“There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.”

CARD CHECK

by Stephen Fleischman

Note to the new prez: a stimulus package won’t do you a damn bit of good unless you can create a surge of purchasing power that will raise spending to lofty heights.

Note to the new working class: demography and immigration have now made you the vanguard; Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, Pakistanis, Middle Easterners, Africans, and others who have migrated to the United States to partake in the American dream. The Jews, the Irish, the Italians, the Germans, the Scandinavians, the Slavs and other middle Europeans have moved up the ladder to fresher fields.

The former union leaders are gone, too; the Gene Debs’, the David Dubinskys, the Sidney Hillmans, The Walter Reuthers , the John L Lewis’, all dim memories.

Today, you are fighting new battles for a fundamental idea—collective bargaining.

The Wagner Act, otherwise known as The National Labor Relations Act was passed during the Roosevelt Administration in 1935. It established a Federal law to protect the rights of workers in the private sector to organize unions, to engage in, and encourage, collective bargaining for labor, permit strikes and other forms of concerted activity in support of their demands. The corporate oligarchy, or “economic royalists” as Franklin Roosevelt called them, fought it, tooth and nail, all the way.

The Act worked well for about 50 of its 75 years. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was one of the first federations of labor unions in the United States, founded by Samuel Gompers in Columbus, Ohio in 1886. The AFL consisted (and still consists) mainly of craft unions.

John L. Lewis, former head of the United Mine Workers, saw industrialism in the US expanding in the first half of the 20th Century. He saw the need for organizing workers in mass production industries. He formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), encompassing steel workers, mine, mill and smelter workers, auto workers, electrical and communication workers, and so many others all open to African Americans and other minorities.

Both federations grew rapidly during the Great Depression. By 1955, they merged, forming the new entity known as the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), as we know it today.

A strong labor movement was welded in the United States that lasted through the 1970s that raised the standard of living for workers. Unions fought for higher wages, better working conditions, health benefits and pension plans. It formed the basis of a broader middle class, the pride of America.

The attack on labor by corporate power was, nevertheless, unrelenting. The “economic royalists”, as Roosevelt called the corporate oligarchy at the time, fought the trade union movement from the very beginning. The profit system necessitated squeezing every bit of labor’s surplus value out of the worker.

Trade unions were forced to fight for survival with bargaining, boycotts and blood. Most of the time, union violence was provoked by industry, exemplified in 1937 when Chicago police killed ten striking steel workers in a bloody, historic battle—the Memorial Day massacre.

Eventually, of course, the employers succeeded.

You could say that the current problem began with the Reagan “revolution”. He struck the first blow by breaking the air-controllers’ (PATCO) strike. It proceeded from there. Corporate power went on a crusade to crush the organized labor movement in this country.

Under capitalism, the assault on labor has always been overwhelming, continuous, inhuman and destructive from the beginning of the industrial revolution to this very day. No wonder unions are dysfunctional and chaotic. So are most of their leaders. If they’re not coerced, co-opted or corrupted, they’re framed, jailed or neutralized in some way. At this stage in our history, corporate America has done a pretty smashing job.

The battle today roils around the attempt in Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. It could give labor organization a fresh boost.

The Act, if passed, would establish a level playing field for workers and union organizers in their struggle against employers and contractors who exploit and intimidate their employees.

Under an Employee Free Choice Act, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) would recognize the union’s role as the official bargaining agent if a majority of employees authorized representation via a card check (signing a card stipulating their preference), without requiring a secret ballot election.

The bill was passed by the House in 2007 and had majority support in the Senate, but was never voted on due to a Republican-led filibuster.

In the new Obama Administration, passing the EFCA will become a number one priority for organized labor. Barack Obama has expressed his support of the measure.

It would get his stimulus package off to a flying start to see a little more of workers’ surplus value lifting purchasing power rather than flowing up into the pockets of the economic royalists.

What Goes Around

by Stephen Fleischman

What happens when one mighty militarized nation smashes a small, defenseless country?

The United States of America has smashed Iraq. The militarized state of Israel is smashing the Gaza Strip.

We have only to wait for the effect to come around.

In Hinduism, the word Karma defines the universal principle of action and reaction that governs all life—the relationship between one event, called cause, and another, called effect, which is the direct consequence, or result, of the first.
Justin Raimondo, in Antiwar.com (1-5-09), says that this latest aerial assault of shock and awe by the Israelis on the Gaza Strip and the subsequent invasion with tanks and artillery benefits al-Qaeda affiliates and the Israelis; and “the losers are the Palestinians and the American people, with the former enduring the slaughter and the later paying for it. We will pay for it not only in billions of our tax dollars, but in terms of the hate-America factor, which will skyrocket on the Arab ‘street’ and inspire many to take up arms against us.”

We have already seen this in “9/11”—the destruction of the World Trade towers. The glib explanation for it was, “They hate us because we’re rich, successful, democratic…” A more reasonable explanation for it would be that our lop-sided foreign policy relating to Israel and the Arab world had a lot to do with building up that hate.

Back in 1933, we had an economic collapse after a stock market crash that led to “the Great Depression”. In the 1932 presidential election, Herbert Hoover, Republican incumbent, lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democrat, who was inaugurated in March of 1933. In that interim period between the November election and the inauguration date (later changed to January 20th), the country sank deeper into depression—very much like it is starting to do now, while waiting for the incoming Obama Administration to officially start governing the country.

Roosevelt took immediate action. He put through the Securities Act of 1933, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to stem the downward spiral.

Glass-Steagall had the greater wallop. It got to the root of the problem. Up to that time, bankers and brokers were sometimes indistinguishable. Congress examined the mixing of the “commercial” and “investment” banking industries that occurred in the 1920s. There were conflicts of interest and fraud in many banking activities. The Glass-Steagall Act set up a stringent barrier to the mixing of these activities as well as establishing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to protect bank deposits.

Glass-Steagall served the country very well for many years. It kept the manipulators and speculators at bay. Like church and state, commercial banking and investment banking must be kept separate.

But, in the 1980s, it fell apart. The “banksters” got the upper hand. The Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act was passed. It started nipping away at Glass-Steagall. A major blow came in November of 1999. Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, the notorious tax-cutter, led the charge. Provisions that prohibit a bank holding company from owning other financial companies were repealed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. The bill was signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton. The deregulators had a field day.

Our economy is now in free fall again, with no Glass-Steagall law to rescue it. In effect, we’ve come around to where we were at the end of the Hoover era in the early 1930s.

There must be a lesson here.

When the first settlers came to America, they found Native American tribes living in a state of primitive communism.

Lewis Henry Morgan, American anthropologist, explored this era in the development of human culture in his classic work, “Ancient Society”, published in 1877. He describes the “communism in living” evident in the village architecture of Native Americans.

Friedrich Engels, collaborator of Karl Marx, in his work, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”, published in 1884, was heavily influenced by Morgan’s evolutionary history. Engels postulated that primitive communism applied to early human societies because hunter-gatherer cultures did not create surpluses.

In a primitive communist society, all able bodied persons would have engaged in obtaining food, and everyone would share in what was produced by hunting and gathering. There would be almost no private property other than articles of clothing and similar personal items, because primitive society produced no surplus; what was produced was quickly consumed. The few things that existed for any length of time (tools, housing) were held communally. There would have been no state.

Primitive societies may have contained all of the features presently associated with the goals of “communism” as conceived today, exemplified by the Marxist slogan, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. In the Marxist view, such an arrangement will be made possible by the abundance of goods and services that a developed communist society will produce; the idea is that there will be enough to satisfy everyone’s needs

With the world now threatened by economic collapse, we may soon find ourselves in a situation where there are no surpluses.

What does this foretell?

Will we be in a state of communism, perhaps less primitive, more sophisticated?

Will we rebuild, but on a higher level?

What went around could come around….