Tuesday, August 7, gave us the presidential candidates’ debate sponsored by the AFL-CIO at Chicago’s Soldier Field. It was a labor, working-class, average-Joe thing, so it was for the Democratic candidates. That would be the party of losers, as Rudy Giuliani recently explained – they want to lose the war and they don’t have enough respect for people who make the country work, which would be those who run the corporations. Hell, they want to tax those people at the old rates from the Clinton years.
The debate was, of course, in the other vein – as the Associated Press explained. John Edwards captured it – “You will never see a picture of me on the front of Fortune magazine.” Giuliani must have smiled at that, but he probably wasn’t watching. His long and close friendship with Rupert Murdoch has now been carefully documented and his sympathies are with the likes of his city’s famous hotelier Leona Helmsley who once said she didn’t pay taxes, as taxes were “for little people.” Yeah, she went to jail for tax evasion, but she went proudly. It’s a Republican thing.
But if Leona Helmsley is the martyr of the Republican Party, Joe Hill will still do nicely for the labor side of the Democratic Party –
From San Diego up to Maine,
In every mine and mill,
Where working-men defend their rights,
It’s there you find Joe Hill,
It’s there you find Joe Hill!
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
Alive as you and me.
Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead”
“I never died” said he,
“I never died” said he.
And Joe Hill isn’t that very obscure – but you might have to look him up. He was a radical songwriter, labor activist and member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), those folks known as the Wobblies. He was executed for murder in 1915 after a controversial trial – there was no direct evidence. After his death we got that song. Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger often performed it, and Bob Dylan claims that Hill’s story was one of his inspirations to begin writing his own songs.
What’s that story? Hill was born in Gävle, a city in the province of Gästrikland, Sweden, and emigrated to the United States in 1902, where he became a migrant laborer, moving from New York City to Cleveland and eventually to the West Coast. He was in San Francisco for the 1906 earthquake and joined the Wobblies around 1910, when he was working on the docks in San Pedro, here in Los Angeles. He moved up in the IWW organization and traveled all over organizing workers for them, writing political songs and satirical poems, and making speeches. He coined the phrase “pie in the sky” – in his song “The Preacher and the Slave” (a parody of the hymn “In the Sweet Bye and Bye”). And he wrote other songs – “The Tramp,” “There Is Power in a Union,” “Rebel Girl,” and “Casey Jones - Union Scab.” He was a bit of a free spirit.
After he was executed his body was sent to Chicago, where it was cremated. His ashes were purportedly sent to every IWW local, but that may be bullshit. On the other hand, in 1988 it was discovered that an envelope had been seized by the Postal Service in 1917 because of its “subversive potential.” The envelope, with a photo captioned, “Joe Hill murdered by the capitalist class, November 19, 1915,” as well as its contents, was deposited at the National Archives. So maybe it was true. After some negotiations, the last of Hill’s ashes (but not the envelope that contained them) was turned over to the IWW in 1988.
And this idea that the working man getting together with others to demand better treatment is “subversive” didn’t die in 1917. The wording just changed. We don’t use the word “subversive” much these days. Those who make trouble aren’t called by the quaint term “subversives.”
Now they’re called “terrorists.” Back in February of 2004 there was this news item –
Education Secretary Rod Paige called the nation’s largest teachers union a “terrorist organization” during a private White House meeting with governors on Monday. Democratic and Republican governors confirmed Paige’s remarks about the National Education Association. “These were the words, ‘The NEA is a terrorist organization,’” said Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle of Wisconsin.
You see what Paige was getting at. Those who band together and demand better wages and better benefits and better working conditions undermine the economy by challenging those who built the key elements of this country’s success, the businesses. You hear it all the time – if you don’t like the low wages or meager benefits or the dangers in the workplace get another damned job – and don’t try to shut down the economy with your whining. You see it’s not just al Qaeda that wants to destroy America. It’s also unions.
Paige resigned, but not over those remarks. That’s standard fare now. It seems when Paige ran the Dallas School District, before he was elevated to running the nation’s education system from DC, his great success there wasn’t a great success after all – the district faked all its test scores. Oops. Fox News and folks like that regretting that, but still lauded him for the remark about unions. This sort of low-grade class warfare has been bubbling along for almost a century now.
The union folks in Chicago have had enough of being called terrorists and losers of course. Joe Hill never died. Via the video archive site Crooks and Liars here is a video clip that proves that. The questioning was finally opened to members of the audience. Steve Skvara, a disabled, retired steel worker from Indiana tells the story of how he lost his family’s health insurance after the company he worked for, for thirty-four years, LTV Steel, closed two years after they forced him to retire. His pension pretty much disappeared and he can’t get health insurance. He received a standing ovation for asking what any of the hopefuls on stage were going to do about such things. It brought down the house. Enough is enough. There are now millions of play-by-the-rules, hard-working folks who have lost their jobs and benefits and, as Logan Murphy at the site notes, face the humiliation of not being able to provide for themselves or their families. The question there is simple – “Can you imagine a Republican fielding a question like this?”
Well, yes. Giuliani would mock him and tell him to stop whining.
The question was directed toward John Edwards and his answer was a bit different. It’s time for universal healthcare for all, like that of every other major western nation, and he himself has, for years, walked picket lines and stood with the unions. You almost expected him to break into a chorus of the Joe Hill song.
There are two Americas. Edwards has been saying that for a long time. It’s kind of obvious. But one of the two Americas, and that would be working-class America, has kind of internalized that they really are losers and whiners, and they can say what’s right and wrong only when they get rich, have their own companies, and don’t pay much in taxes. Until then, well, they should think about their failings as human beings. It’s the shame of not being rich. Americans are better than any another other people on earth at wallowing in that special shame. There’s no modern Joe Hill to snap them out of it and get them all proud and angry. It’s certainly not John Edwards.
It really is amazing how almost everyone who is not rich has bought into that whole idea, that odd shame. On the other hand, it certainly drives up the sales of lottery tickets. “One day I won’t be a loser.” Shame and hopeless odds keep people quiet and docile. It works just fine.
And there is what Skinnerian psychologists would call the intermittent reinforcement –
How do people get ahead in the workplace? One way seems to be by making their subordinates miserable, according to a study released Friday.
In the study to be presented at a conference on management this weekend, almost two-thirds of the 240 participants in an online survey said the local workplace tyrant was either never censured or was promoted for domineering ways.
“The fact that 64.2 percent of the respondents indicated that either nothing at all or something positive happened to the bad leader is rather remarkable - remarkably disturbing,” wrote the study’s authors, Anthony Don Erickson, Ben Shaw and Zha Agabe of Bond University in Australia.
Despite their success in the office, spiteful supervisors can cause serious malaise for their subordinates, the study suggested, citing nightmares, insomnia, depression and exhaustion as symptoms of serving a brutal boss.
The authors advocated immediate intervention by industry chiefs to stop fledgling office authoritarians from rising up the ranks.
That won’t work, as Digby points out –
This kind of thing is a value in the business world, a sign of “toughness.” A willingness to come through a torturous boot-camp still striving for success at all costs and then turn it on your underlings is what they call being a “team player.”
This stuff is so far off the radar screen of discussions of what it is to work in America it’s as if it’s from a foreign planet. That study can really only be discussed in terms of whether it’s really efficient for a business to operate with a bunch of depressed, traumatized employees, not whether it’s morally decent to reward despicable behavior and treat your fellow humans like lackeys. The boss owns your ass and you do what the boss wants or you quit. If you can…
So you have your shame, and your depressed, traumatized employees, so things move along nicely. It may not be morally decent to reward despicable behavior and treat your fellow humans like lackeys, but, if what you read is true that’s how Giuliani ran the city way back when. Heck, that’s how he treated his first two wives and the various children, but that’s another matter.
Digby also notes that we talk a lot about “freedom” in America but it has “a very restricted meaning in our culture.” You can own a gun of course –
But in a million subtle little ways, the average workers in this culture must subject themselves to daily humiliation and accept its soul deadening effect and they aren’t even allowed to complain about it. What choice do most of us have? You have kids, you worry about being able to live like a human being when you are too old to work and your choices narrow anyway. The price you pay in America today for debt, error and risk is very high and getting higher. So you submit. And without the potential of losing employees due to bad treatment, no business feels any real obligation to treat them with respect. Why bother?
She calls this all part of the Big Con –
The right makes a fetish out of freedom, but in practice they are institutionalizing a different kind of servitude through things like “bankruptcy reform” and union busting and privatization and vetoing of government guaranteed health care. Even this housing bust will no doubt turn out fine for wealthy lenders who will be able to declare corporate bankruptcy, while many ordinary people will not be allowed to walk away at all from their second mortgages or, in some states, their primary mortgage if they go bankrupt. Today, too many people become a prisoner of the American dream, completely trapped in jobs and careers that destroy their humanity and damage their psyches because the risks of doing anything unsafe in our “winner take all” society tie them in knots.
And she notes the other side’s argument, and its flaws –
I’m sure there are many people who disagree with this and who believe that if you just pull yourself up by your bootstraps you can move up or out. Some do. But for a large number of people, the psychological break that’s required to be the biggest asshole in the office is too much and entrepreneurial risks of leaving are too high, so they turn into machines, just trying to get through the day and not think too much until they can get home and have a drink or play a video game or just stare into space until they have to get up and do it all over again.
The real issue –
Our culture has become so viciously competitive that even our most sophisticated organizations are operated by little more than the law of the jungle (on the macro as well as the micro level.) This is why we need worker’s rights, universal health care, a decent enforceable work week, reliable retirement programs - all these things allow the average American worker to do more than just survive in the competitive world in which we live. It gives them a chance to pursue happiness, which, last I heard, is still one of the fundamental promises of our nation…
Things just don’t work that way anymore. That inalienable right to pursue happiness has become discretionary. And we now have “a system that forces people to indenture themselves for something like health insurance.” So be it.
Joe Hill is dead. People assume that’s the way it is now –
Nobody wants to talk about this because it’s somehow “soft” to think that people who don’t work in the fields or factories are suffering. Maybe so. But there are many millions of Americans whose futures are seriously compromised, deeply in debt, filled with fear that they will lose everything because of one wrong word to some sadistic jackass who sits in a corner office. If that’s the middle class American Dream then I’d suggest it’s not worth having.
What if there is no other option?
And one should not forget the concurrent Utah mining disaster, mentioned in the Chicago debate again and again. Joe Hill is still dead –
The president of the Utah mine where six miners are missing has been vocal against more regulation of the coal industry, even going as far as to call Sen. Hillary Clinton “anti-American” for suggesting the nation needed a president who is for workers’ safety.
During an interview with Fox News’ Neil Cavuto in May, Robert Murray responded to a comment from Clinton, who asked a crowd whether they were ready for a president who is “pro-labor and will appoint people who actually care about workers’ rights and workers’ safety.”
“Bob, do you view this rhetoric as pro-labor, anti-business, what?” Cavuto asked Murray.
“Absolutely not,” Murray responded. “I view it as anti-American. These people should - are misleading the American worker then they talk about jobs. These are the people advocating draconian global warming conditions that are going to drive American jobs to foreign countries and raise electric rates for everybody on fixed incomes.”
… The Mine Safety and Health Administration has cited Murray’s mine in central Utah with more than 300 violations since January 2004, including 118 “significant and substantial” violations that are considered serious enough to cause injury or death.
Murray, who testified against regulation of the energy industry as part of effort to combat global warming, said the changes to the coal industry would cause losses of high-paying mining jobs and would be “extremely destructive” to the nation.
Hey, someone had to carry on the Ron Paige effort – and on Fox News of course. There’s no Joe Hill around with clever, pointed songs to call them on the bullshit – and who would listen to such things these days?
So you have your shame, and your depressed, traumatized employees, so things move along nicely. Oh yeah – add sudden death to the list. Like taxes, that too is for the little people.
It would be nice if Joe Hill returned.
