There is more to May Day than a trip around the maypole. Today is International Worker’s Day, when we remember, and celebrate, battles fought and won by the American labor movement.

On the 2nd of November in 1909, during what became known as the “Uprising of the 20,000,” female garment workers went on strike in New York. Many were arrested and a judge told those arrested: “You are on strike against God.”

Wow…who’d have guessed?

There’s nothing unpatriotic about the union movement; it’s as American as apple pie.  Boston carpenters walked off the job in April of 1825 in the interest of a 10-hour workday. Ten years later, children working in the silk mills in Patterson, New Jersey went on strike. Of course they had an outrageous demand: A six-day workweek of eleven hour days.

Sweatshops, eleven-hour days, inadequate wages and wretched or dangerous working conditions are largely a thing of the past. The result is we tend not to notice or care about Capitalism’s continuous attack on the power and even the existence of the union movement. This may not be a good thing.

A union is the average hourly worker’s only defense against the economic power of a system that always tries to buy raw materials (that’s you, oh my brothers and sisters) at the lowest possible price. It’s not dumb, if you’re an hourly wage person, to remember you’re just so much raw material to that system.

May Day Events Today:

9:00 Annual Tucson May 1st Coalition March for Immigrant and Workers Rights, from Greyhound Park Parking lot to Armory Park for a Noon rally with speakers, entertainment and info booths.

Afterwards, join Occupy Tucson at Armory Park for extended fun, entertainment, potluck, and other activities, well into the evening.

Americans have learned the hard way that when rich organizations and wealthy individuals shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they get what they want.

Moyers gave the keynote speech at the 40th Anniversary celebration of    Public Citizen, the legendary nonprofit consumer advocacy organization founded in 1971 to represent consumer interests in government. The entire speech is too long to repost as a blog entry, but in sum he argues that although most of us pay lip service to the traditional ideals of the American dream we have largely given up the notion that it’s possible for us. The oligarchs have won.

The great American experience in creating a different future together this voluntary union for the common good has been flummoxed by “a growing sense of political impotence, what the historian Lawrence Goodwyn has described as a mass resignation of people who believe “the dogma of democracy on a superficial public level but who no longer believe it privately. There has been, he says, a decline in what people think they have a political right to aspire to, a decline of individual self-respect on the part of millions off Americans.

You can understand why. We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to produce the policies favored by the majority of Americans. We speak, we write, we advocate,  and those in power turn deaf ears and blind eyes to our deepest aspirations. We petition, plead, and even pray, yet the earth that is our commons, which should be passed on in good condition to coming generations, continues to be despoiled. We invoke the strain in our national DNA that attests to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as the produce of political equality, yet private wealth multiplies as public goods are beggared. . . .

. . . And the property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly feared as an unseemly “veneration for wealth” are now openly in force; the common denominator of public office, even for our judges, is a common deference to cash.

It is not hard, Moyers says, to understand what Occupy Wall Street is all about. It is about the sign he saw being carried by a woman at an OWS march: “I can’t afford to buy a politician so I bought this sign.”

Moyers goes on to quote from a surprising source:

We know what all this money buys. Americans have learned the hard way that when rich organizations and wealthy individuals shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they get what they want. 

They know that if you don’t contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying, you pick up a disproportionate share of America’s tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You’re compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You’re barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors. 

In contrast the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives it approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed.

I didn’t crib that litany from Public Citizen’s muckraking investigations over the years, although I could have. Nor did I lift it from Das Kapital by Karl Marx or Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book. No, I was literally quoting Time Magazine, long a tribune of America’s establishment media. From the bosom of mainstream media comes the bald, spare, and damning conclusion: We now have: “a government for the few at the expense of the many.”

Moyers goes on to to say:

But let me call another witness from the pro-business and capitalist- friendly press. In the middle of the last decade, four years before the Great Collapse of 2008, the editors of The Economist warned:

    A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the (first) Gilded Age. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace

Everywhere you look in modern America, in the Hollywood Hills or the canyons of Wall Street, in the Nashville recording studios or the clapboard houses of Cambridge, Massachusetts’ you see elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves. America is increasingly looking like imperial Britain, with dynastic ties proliferating, social circles interlocking, mechanisms of social exclusion strengthening, and a gap widening between the people who make decisions and shape the culture and the vast majority of working stiffs.

Hear the editors of The Economist: “The United States is on its way to becoming a European-style class-based society.”

 

Read the full speech here.

Cold weather and clean-up sweeps by armored riot police are shifting the Occupy Wall Street movement from literal occupation of public spaces to other forms of political action.

On balance the literal occupation of public space has been successful. The focus of public attention has been shifted from the single issue of national debt to the fact that our financial and political systems have become so dysfunctional  that they are resistant to reform or problem solving.

A commenter to an earlier post observed that the number of people actually in tents was a vanishingly small percentage of the nation’s population. True enough, but immaterial. The same was true of marchers for women’s suffrage, active protestors to the Viet Nam war, Mahatma Gandhi or Rosa Parks.

Those protestors were symptoms of a dis-satisfaction with underlying social and political conditions and they would soon become the centers  for general protest and reform.

It is hard to ignore the fact that OWS quickly spread from coast to coast. The conservative press tried to characterize the occupiers as a kind of children’s crusade aided by drummers, pot smokers and the unwashed. It is certainly true that a majority of the tenters were young…although not all…but there were plenty of older folks on hand, too.

Some conservative pundits are apparently heaving a sigh of relief now that OWS is “dead.” They equate the removal of the physical occupations with a removal of the movement. They are, of course, wrong; and apparently blind and deaf to the impact of the social media.

OWS has simply moved to another level of political action and different bits of real estate. We should expect to see flash mobs, organized protests, marches, and other forms of guerrilla consciousness raising keeping on the pressure for reform.

These actions will be very annoying to the establishment. Good.

Less annoying, and possible more effective, will be a technique borrowed from a more traditional campaign book: The campaign  coffee gatherings in private homes.

Occupy Your Living Room is a way to take part in OWS without camping in the park. Simply invite your friends and neighbors to your home for an “Occupy Coffee.” Explain why you are sympathetic to the movement and be ready to point out facts about the way (for instance) the financial industry, left unsupervised, was responsible for the nation’s economic near collapse.

There’s no telling what you might learn. At a recent social gathering a friend mentioned something that he thought was outrageous: Apparent legal insider trading by members of Congress. It was new to me. Is it new to you?

Have a look.