Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.
– Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 1848

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

As I sit here in the dark of the early morning hours and contemplate the state of the world, I can’t help but laugh at a growing sense of déjà vu and say to myself, in perfect contradictory fashion: This is all new; yet we have been here before.

While the friendly network newscasters do their best to make us feel good about the Summer Olympic Games in China, showing us pictures of our good old boy President George W. Bush hanging out with the lady’s volleyball team and such, the military planners are staking out new territory in Georgia for a new war against Russia.

I guess the radical Muslim “terrorists” turned out not to be enough of a threat to keep their arms businesses growing. And of course there’s the news that the Iraqi government we set up now wants us out and they want to see our plan for withdrawal by September.

So let’s bring back the threat from the Russian Bear, they must be saying in their corporate board rooms over Cognac and raw red meat.

Meanwhile here at home, Bush’s former political consultant Karl Rove gets his face on Face the Nation Sunday telling Senator John McCain what he has to do to win the presidency, all while he is in contempt of Congress and should be in jail rather than lecturing the Republican presidential candidate on TV.

All of this is completely lost on most workers and families in the United States of America and certainly in the state of Alabama, where the only Georgia anyone around here knows anything about is the one next door where the Atlanta Braves play baseball.

As I often do when I need to escape the electromagnetic field of the computer bank, I took a drive around Blount and St. Clair Counties Saturday to visit a blueberry farm and some fans, and then took the long route over Pine Mountain and back into Springville from the north, where I had heard they were throwing a big free party for the people of that community.

People are so desperate to get a break from the stress of all the wars and the high price of gas, the crashing economy and the seemingly endless presidential campaign that they will gladly sit in a lawn chair in an open field and take the free snow cones and listen to some rock music and let the kids get their faces painted and have a good time, maybe sneak a sip of a beer or two, hoping that the news is just all a bunch of bullshit and we will all wake up from this bad dream soon and all will be right with the world again.

Sadly, there is another private war going on that is not being reported on TV, or in the mainstream newspapers either.

While the arms merchants are drumming up another war in Georgia, the corporate bosses are hard at work in the planning stages of how to control the outcome of the presidential election in November to make sure their financial interests are met, while the workers just get screwed again.

According to a fascinating piece of journalism like nothing you will ever see again in an American newspaper, AlterNet.org carried a story the other day detailing how “big business” is preparing a war chest of at least $150 million to stop progressive economic legislation no matter who is elected president that could bring some relief to the working families of America.

“There is nothing more terrifying to corporate America than the prospect of dealing with its workforce on an even playing field, and, along with allies on the Right, it’s pulling out all the stops to keep that from happening,” the author writes. And he is right.

At stake is much more than the usual tax breaks, trade deals and relentless deregulation; corporations are gearing up for a fight to preserve a status quo in which the largest share of America’s national income goes to profits and the smallest share to wages since the Great Depression….

The article details a coming fight over a piece of legislation most Americans have never heard of, the Employee Free Choice Act, a measure that would go a long way toward guaranteeing working people the right to join a union, a bill which has the potential to reverse more than three decades of painful stagflation, where prices rise and paychecks remain flat for the middle class and the working poor.

The bill is pretty simple. It would beef up penalties for employers who violate workers’ rights under the law, create a mediation and arbitration system for disputes and allow workers to form a union if a majority simply sign a card saying they want representation.

“This bill alone won’t reverse the long decline of American labor — union organizers say more is needed to create a truly level playing field — but it would be a huge step in the right direction,” the author concludes.

But it may never pass, and certainly not if Bush or McCain have anything to say about it.

The Chamber of Commerce, Washington lobbyists, firms that rely on cheap labor and a host of “astroturf” front groups are building a war chest to try and build a firewall against the legislation and other efforts to put a check on corporate power.

And at the heart of the battle are managers at the number one employer of underpaid workers in the U.S., everyone’s place to buy cheap shit made in China: Wal-Mart.

A recent report on the front page of the Wall Street Journal — not exactly a bastion of liberal journalism — concluded that Wal-Mart is “mobilizing its store managers and department supervisors” in an effort to discourage workers from voting for the Democrat in November.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is mobilizing its store managers and department supervisors around the country to warn that if Democrats win power in November, they’ll likely change federal law to make it easier for workers to unionize companies — including Wal-Mart.

In recent weeks, thousands of Wal-Mart store managers and department heads have been summoned to mandatory meetings at which the retailer stresses the downside for workers if stores were to be unionized.

The actions … reflect a growing concern among big business that a reinvigorated labor movement could reverse years of declining union membership. That could lead to higher payroll and health costs for companies already being hurt by rising fuel and commodities costs and the tough economic climate.

The Wal-Mart human-resources managers who run the meetings don’t specifically tell attendees how to vote in November’s election, but make it clear that voting for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama would be tantamount to inviting unions in, according to Wal-Mart employees who attended gatherings in Maryland, Missouri and other states.

“The meeting leader said, ‘I am not telling you how to vote, but if the Democrats win, this bill will pass and you won’t have a vote on whether you want a union,’” said a Wal-Mart customer-service supervisor from Missouri. “I am not a stupid person. They were telling me how to vote,” she said.

Also, according to a report in the conservative National Journal “several business-backed groups … (including) two fledgling coalitions fighting labor-supported legislation and the conservative political group Freedom’s Watch are trying to raise $100 million for issue advocacy and get-out-the-vote efforts to benefit about 10 GOP Senate races.”

None of this is by accident, according to AlterNet.

“Union-busting has reached a high art form in the United States. Companies no longer need thugs and gun-toting Pinkertons to keep workers from exercising their legal rights to organize; now they have high-priced, Armani-wearing lawyers to do the job.”

The tactics are as subtle as they are insidious.

A study by Cornell University … found that: 9 in 10 employers facing a union campaign force employees to attend closed-door meetings to hear anti-union propaganda; 80 percent train supervisors on how to attack unions and require them to deliver anti-union messages to workers they oversee; half of employers threaten to shut down the plant if workers organize; and 3 out of 4 hire outside consultants to run anti-union campaigns, “often based on mass psychology and distorting the law.”

Increasingly, cunning forms of intimidation are often enough to produce a “no” vote. If organizers manage to get and win a vote among workers to unionize, management is able to dispute the outcome, and the case can drag on, often for years. While it’s pending, pro-union workers lose their jobs: A study published (PDF) by economists John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer found that “almost one in five union organizers or activists can expect to be fired as a result of their activities in a union election campaign.”

That’s illegal, but since the Reagan administration, U.S. labor protections have been thoroughly gutted, and companies that cross the line pay only modest penalties that can be written off as part of the cost of remaining union-free.

On top of all that, the Bush administration has basically put out of business the only regulatory agency that might police the actions of corporate managers in this election.

According to a fine piece of independent journalism from the National Affairs Desk of Rolling Stone magazine, the old home of Hunter S. Thompson, “the magnitude of what we’re dealing with here” involves “the biggest pile of political contributions in the history of free elections, nearly a billion dollars given to presidential candidates in this season alone.”

Because the FEC has been dead in the water for so long, it’s likely that we’ll still be in the dark about a large chunk of this record manure pile of campaign contributions when we go to vote in November.

But that doesn’t mean that a little sifting through campaign records doesn’t tell us quite a lot about who’s backing whom in these races. The truth is that the campaigns of both Barack Obama and John McCain are being inundated with cash from more or less exactly the same gorgons of the corporate scene.

From Wall Street to the Big Oil powerhouses to the military-industrial complex, America’s fat-cat business leaders know that the Animal House-style party of the last eight years that made almost all of them rich with bonuses, government contracts and bubble profits is about to come to an end, and someone is going to have to pay to clean up the mess. They want that someone to be you, not them, and they’ve spared no expense to make sure both presidential candidates will be there to bail them out next year.

They’re succeeding. Both would-be presidents have already sold us out. They’ve taken the money and run — completing the cyclical transformation of the American political narrative from one of monopolistic Republican iniquity to an even more depressing tale about the overweening power of corporate money and the essentially fictitious nature of our two-party system.

In layman’s terms, we’ve gone from being screwed to being fucked.

The author says it is possible Obama will surprise us if he wins the election in November. “But if you look at the money, it doesn’t look good.”

In addition to the usual suspects who always give big to buy influence no matter which party holds power, one of the most interesting cases is Senator John McCain’s recent flip-flop on telecom immunity. McCain is raking in the campaign dough from telecommunications magnates such as ATandT and Verizon, and some of their own PR flaks and lobbyists are directly involved in his campaign.

As recently as last November, McCain was staunchly opposed to retroactive immunity for telecommunication companies that took part in Bush’s illegal spying on American consumers, saying their actions “undermine our respect for the law.” But recently, with his campaign coffers filled with telecom cash, McCain calls himself an “unqualified” supporter of immunity, praising the telecom industry’s warrantless wiretapping as “constitutional and appropriate.”

But due to his age and the bumbling nature of his campaign and the obvious rock star quality of how Obama has caught on, Wall Street is not putting all its bets on McCain in November. In fact, there’s ample evidence that the money men are already placing their bets on Obama to win.

The financial disaster dumped on us by eight years of Bush’s mismanagement has left America with the prospect of short-term solutions in the form of massive government bailouts, and long-term solutions in the form of reform and regulation. A big chunk of the $1 billion in cash that will be spent on the presidential race this year represents Wall Street’s desire to make sure that both candidates can be counted on to make the short-term bailouts large and passionate, and the reforms gentle and halfhearted.

“They want to make sure there’s socialism when they need it — bailouts — and capitalism when they need that,” says Robert Pollin, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts.

For all the excitement that Barack Obama has generated, and all the talk about a “new day” in Washington, it would be tragic if the real legacy of his election victory was to finally expose the essentially unchanging, oligarchic nature of our political system, the writer concludes.

“It’s the same old story: Money talks, and bullshit walks. And don’t be surprised if we’re the ones still walking after November.”

While I know it is anathema to the good working people of Alabama and America to even mention the name Karl Marx, as someone who actually spent some time studying his work along with a host of other scholars, many of whom disagree, I sit here and think about those people at that free festival and it is impossible not to think of the words of Marx—and wonder if we face another “decisive hour.”

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.

“All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities,” Marx said.

Well, then, what are we waiting for? Let’s get on with it.

Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 11:15 am and is filed under Under the Microscope III. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.