“They’re telling workers they’ve got to step back and do with less. What does that mean? Not having a car? Not being able to make the payments on their house? Not being able to send their kids to college? Not having any money for recreation? I thought that what’s it all about–to make the life of the worker decent and with dignity and the ability to enjoy the things of society like culture and recreation. Now they’re saying we’ve taken too much from the corporations.”  —Alice Puerala 1928-1986.

The fires of steelmaking burned all along the southern shores of Lake Michigan when Alice Peurala entered US Steel’s South Works in 1953. Today most of those fires have gone out and with them the thousands of jobs that were once the economic support system for the Southeast Chicago-Gary region, a region that has still not recovered in 2012. 

Contrary to what you may have read, this was not a “loss” of manufacturing, like dropping one’s car keys in a parking lot or having a few coins slip between your couch cushions. This was deliberate theft and vandalism by what we now call the 1%. By failing to properly invest in modernization, failing to see the impact of globalization, failing to see the importance of a national industrial policy as their foreign rivals did, and turning a deaf ear to their own workers, the steel company owners helped create the economic disaster that we have today. The United Steel Workers(USW), the union that represented most of the steel mills, was trapped in an organizational structure and bargaining model that was unprepared for the employer onslaught.

 The fires of South Works light up the night in this vintage postcard 

 

US Steel’s South Works 1970 

 

The South Works site today.

A Woman Who Refused to Take No for an Answer

When Puerala entered Chicago’s South Works mill in 1953 there were few women employed there. Most of the women who had steel jobs as a result of WWII had left those jobs when the men returned home. The women who remained faced gender discrimination in hiring and promotion. Still, Peurala found that most of the male steelworkers she encountered were pretty decent and helped her learn the tricks of the steelmaking trade that allowed her to do the job.

Having been an activist in the Civil Rights Movement, Chicago steelworker Alice Peurala knew that the 1964 Civil Rights Act covered gender as well as race. So in 1967, when she was denied a promotion from her  job in the Metallurgical Division to a better job in one of the product testing  labs, she decided to fight.

The union would not take her case so she went to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).The product testing lab job was a day job, which would give her her more time to be with her daughter in the evenings. She had been told that since the job required overtime and heavy lifting, she was ineligible as a woman.  The EEOC determined that the company had lied about the heavy lifting, the onerous overtime, and the education requirements. They recommended that she sue.

She found a lawyer willing to take her case, the young Patrick Murphy , who freely admitted that he knew little about civil rights law, but dedicated himself to the case anyway. After much foot-dragging, and many objections from US Steel attorneys, a compromise settlement was reached with pressure from the judge. Peurala would be next in line for a product tester’s job. Then when US Steel tried to circumvent the settlement, the judge hit the roof and Peurala finally got her promotion in 1969.

It was not just a victory for her personally, but a victory for all women in manufacturing. It was also a victory for democracy in the workplace. The 1974 Consent Decree that was signed by 9 major steel companies, the steelworkers union and the EEOC was a major step forward in the battle against racial and gender discrimination in the industry. Cases like Alice Puerala’s lawsuit helped make that possible. As a socialist, Peurala understood how divisions within the working class weakened the power and moral authority  of the labor movement and she was determined to change that.

She was one of the tough, smart working class leaders emerging in the 1960’s who were determined to erase decades of discrimination and challenge the iron-fisted dictatorial control of the steel company owners. They would also challenge the leadership of the United Steel Workers of America and fight for reforms within the union itself. Peurala would eventually be elected the first woman president of a steelworkers’ local, but tragically at a time when Corporate America decided to dismantle US manufacturing, sell it off in pieces and move much of it abroad.

A Life of Work and Struggle

Peurala was the daughter of Armenian immigrants. Born in 1928 in St. Louis, she grew up in a family that was well acquainted with persecution. In the wake of the Armenian genocide perpetrated by Turkey, her father had deserted the Turkish army and came to the USA on a false passport. Her mom never did find out what happened to her parents in the wake of the killings. While her mom stayed at home her dad worked as molder in a foundry and served as shop steward in the union. Her family was pro-union and politically involved in trying to recover Armenian lands from Turkey, as had been promised by President Wilson after World War I. Like the children of most immigrant families, Peurala was well acquainted with hard work, taking her first job at 14.

“I think probably when I was at the end of the eighth grade, when I was about 14. I started working as a cashier in a movie house. And then I worked summers in little two by four factories. I remember working when I was about fifteen or sixteen the whole summer. One was a place where they made soles for shoes. And it was a messy job, you did everything by hand. You had all these things that you cut out and you soaked them in different solutions.Your hands would get messy and the solutions would smell terrible.

I used to think in later years it was probably dangerous to your health. I didn’t think it then because we were making money. It was only young people working there. There was a place where they made small tool parts and that. And then I worked in a Venetian blind factory after school. That’s when I was in high school. I went [to work] at four and worked until ten everyday. And then I worked all day on Saturday. They really ended at about twelve, but because I was a high school student they let me go home at ten.”— from an interview by Elizabeth Balanoff

After finishing high school, she took a job in retail and plunged into the world of organized labor, making friends with union organizer Bernice Fisher, one of the founders of the Congress of Racial Equality(CORE). Besides her union activism Peurala joined sit-ins against racial discrimination as a member of CORE. Her was union affiliated with the teamsters district headed up by Harold Gibbons, a progressive socialist-minded anomaly in a union better known at the time for its ties with organized crime. Gibbons encouraged women’s union activism through labor education, attendance at  union meetings and writing articles for the union publications.

A very independent-minded young woman, Peurala  left her home in 1950 and traveled to Chicago, much to the dismay of our parents who expected her to stay home until she was married, as was the custom for “good” Armenian girls. She took jobs in Chicago retail stores and factories, each time working as a union organizer, sometimes winning union representation and sometimes not. The conditions in some of the workplaces were terrible, especially where the workers were women. In a candy factory where she worked briefly, the women who had been there for years seemed permanently  hunched over from the constant bending that their jobs required.

Because of her leftwing views she was accused of being a communist and had to fight red-baiting charges during a union representation battle at a large Stewart-Warner auto parts plant. There were periods of when she was out of a job because of her union organizing work and she relied on unemployment compensation and the support of her union friends.

Alice Puerala in South Works 

She eventually married, took a job at  US Steel’s South Works as a metallurgical observer, had a child and then quickly divorced the father because of his alcoholism. A single mom on a swing shift with a young daughter, she could not do union work  for several years. Fortunately she found a woman who would do childcare for her on a very flexible schedule. Her steelworker wages allowed her the expense of childcare plus enough left over to get by. She found work in the steel mill an interesting challenge.

“I found the steel mill very interesting when I first went in it, very unique. I guess it was a challenge in a way. I didn’t think too much about the female-male ratio). about my being in a plant that was mostly men except that there were men on the job who still, even though women had been hired in the steel industry during the war and there were some left (many of them had gone).

There were two other women on the job that I was on and I know when they hired me they told me that in that particular occupation in the steel mill they had hired women during the war and there were a number of women still left on that occupation. It seemed to be one that women stuck with. So the other women that were in the mill at that time were not on the occupation I was on. They were either pit recorders ingot buggy operators or oilers. A lot of them were oilers. They had stayed since the war.”– from the Balanoff interview.

After her victory in the lawsuit, Peurala started becoming more active in the union. She joined Steelworkers Fightback, a rank and file steelworker insurgency group which developed a large following in District 31 of the steel workers union. Led by a third generation steelworker named  Ed Sadlowski, Steelworkers Fightback introduced a progressive militancy into the steel industry that had not been seen since the early days of the CIO. Sadlowski was elected Local 65 president in 1964 at the age of 24 and became District 31 director in 1973. He was unsuccessful in his bid for the national presidency in 1977.

Although steelworkers had finally achieved a modest middle class lifestyle, the work could still be quite dangerous. There was constant harassment by supervisors and the mills were rife with racial & gender discrimination. The national steelworkers leadership had pushed through the Experimental Negotiating Agreement(ENA), a no-strike clause in exchange for concessions for the company on wages and other issues. Steelworkers Fightback was against the ENA and thought that the national union needed more democracy and more rank and file participation.

After several attempts at union office in Local 65 which represented US Steel’s South Works, Puerala was elected to the grievance committee in 1976.

“Being a griever is very time consuming and it’s very exhausting. When you are not working, you’re fighting grievances for workers that are getting suspended and fired. You become involved in those human beings who are being fired and need their jobs. You rack your brain to do your best in representing them and it takes a lot out of you. You’re also working within the union, trying to make your grievance committee more effective…I have spent a lot of years in the union fighting for certain things. For example, we passed resolutions against the war in Vietnam, probably one of the few steelworkers’ local unions that did. I felt pretty good about that. So many people that I personally like, and thought a lot of, really didn’t think it could be done.”—- from the Balanoff interview

Despite the 1974 Consent Decree, gender discrimination still dominated  the mills. Women were being forced to take sick leave for pregnancy and made ineligible for unemployment of medical insurance. There were reports of women feeling compelled to have abortions to survive economically. Women steelworkers suspected that the companies were using pregnancy to rid themselves of women they never wanted to hire in the first place.

There were problems with promotions. Puerala felt that the company was hiring inexperienced women off the street to do jobs they couldn’t handle instead of promoting experienced women from inside the plant. They could then get rid of them before their promotion periods were up.The new hires were being set up to fail. Another insidious tactic was suddenly enforcing rules that had been ignored for years when women were hired. According to Local 65 member Roberta Wood:

“There was an informal agreement between the men working the blast furnace that they could exchange assignments if they didn’t want to work a specific job on a particular day. They traded jobs and took turns on the worst assignments. In the rush to prove that women can’t do the job, the company came down hard and stupid. The showed us the rules from the book. This caused a  a lot of resentment toward the women. I think the company knew it would.”—from conversations with Mary Margaret Fonow

Inexperienced women felt pressured to prove themselves in situations that could be dangerous. Diane Gumulauski was seriously injured that way:

“While I was working on the lids (the coke ovens), I was told to move these 100 lb lead boxes. I wanted to prove i could do it. That all women could do it. After the third lift, I ripped open my intestines and had to be rushed to the hospital. It took surgery and a three month recover period. What I didn’t know at the time was that no man would have lifted that much weight. They would have asked for a helper or simply refused.” —from the Fonow conversations.

Puerala responded to Gumulauski’s story in anger:

“We can’t allow men to decide what women’s rights are. They aren’t the ones who’ll get hurt, we are. If those bastards try that trick again, tell them where to shove it. The men never put up with this shit.”

Puerala helped to organize the Local 65 Women’s Committee as well as the District 31 Women’s Caucus. Steelworker women activists plunged themselves into a wide variety of campaigns from fighting for stronger affirmative action enforcement to improving the decrepit state of the women’s washrooms. They formed alliances with feminist groups across the region, refuting the rightwing smear that feminism was only a movement for privileged white women. They became active in the newly formed Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW).

District 31 made a major push for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), sending hundreds of steelworkers, both men and women, to state legislatures to lobby for equal rights. While some local media tried to make a joke out of  “burly male steelworkers” campaigning for women’s rights, steelworker women didn’t think it was funny at all. They understood the important of working class solidarity against social injustice. Peurala herself was also active in the anti-war and the reproductive rights movement.

Once dubbed “Alice in Wonderland” by men who thought a woman could never lead a largely male steelworks local, Alice Peurala won the presidency of the Local 65 in 1979.

“I did not win as a woman. I campaigned as a candidate who would do something about conditions in the plant that affect 7500 people—men and women…People in the plant looked on me as a fighter. I think it demonstrates that the men in the plant will vote for someone who is going to for them, make the union work for them.” — from Rocking the Boat

But Peurala’s victory came when the American steel industry was about to collapse. In an atmosphere of fear caused by mass layoffs, she was was narrowly defeated for re-election in 1982, but was re-elected in 1985. But by 1985, the local was down to 800 members and Alice Peurala faced a new enemy.— cancer. On June 21, 1986, her steelworker’s heart went silent and the working class lost one of is finest and most steadfast leaders.

A Legacy To Remember

 “You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.”–Frank Sobotka, The Wire

Today  the dismantling of US manufacturing is usually blamed on “greedy unions”. That’s nonsense of course. For a brief period, from the 1950’s to the 1980’s, a little more than one generation, a significant number of unionized industrial workers achieved a modest middle class lifestyle. But even then the nature of the work could take a heavy toll on mind and body. Their middle class status was always precarious, with workers only one layoff or bad accident away from serious  economic troubles.

As cracks in the American economic dream began to appear in the late 1970’s, the unions representing America’s industrial workers made concession after concession in an effort to save jobs, concessions that were largely unsuccessful in doing that. Somehow it was always the workers who were expected to give up hard won gains or even their jobs, while top management and financial investors never seem to worry about how to pay the mortgage or put food on the table when hard times hit.

Neither government nor private enterprise stepped up to the plate to create effective job retraining for laid off workers. The hi-tech and service jobs that were supposed to replace manufacturing proved to be largely illusionary or low-paid.

Both management and union stumbled, but “greedy workers” were not the problem. American manufacturing management was a victim of short term thinking and a lack of imagination. It did not understand the importance of a government industrial policy. It was clueless about how to operate in a global marketplace. It was organized in a topdown dictatorial bureaucratic manner.  Sadly, America’s manufacturing unions were organized in much the same way.

For all of our brave talk about “democracy” we don’t apply it to the area of economics. As a nation we were right to criticize the dismal results of Soviet style centralized industrial “planning.” We failed to see that having our industrial “planning” done by a relatively small number of centralized corporations run as virtual dictatorships wasn’t much of an alternative. The industrial unions clung to much the same model and many workers gradually became alienated and saw them as little more than a kind of insurance policy, resulting in low levels of rank and file involvement. When the time came to fight for survival, most workers just were not well prepared.

This lack of a democratic culture within US manufacturing was grossly inefficient. Alice Peurala spent an enormous amount of her time battling company enforced racial and gender discrimination. One of the best grievance handlers at South Works, she also spent entirely too much time fighting back against petty harassment of workers by supervisors who were trying to impose an atmosphere of fear and intimidation demanded from the top. She also spent an enormous amount of her time battling the entrenched leadership of the steelworker’s union, which was leading rank and file steelworkers to disaster.

Manufacturing is more than just machines and processes. It also about living breathing people with minds.  Imagine if working class leaders like Peurala had been able to apply their formidable abilities toward improving the manufacturing process with genuine worker involvement instead of having to fight for clean washrooms. What a goddam waste of working class talent, time and energy.

Throughout her life, Alice Peurala was devoted to the idea of democracy. She was on the right track. If we are to revive manufacturing as well as the rest of our economy, we will need to do it differently than in the past. Until we learn how to apply democracy to our economics we will continue to be trapped in an inefficient, wasteful, polluting system that degrades our humanity and the planet we live on.

I never met Alice personally, but saw her at a number of rallies around Chicago back in the day. A steel worker friend of mine who did know her said that in addition to being a a tough smart negotiator, she also played a mean hand of poker. Several retired steelworkers have contacted me and told of their high regard for her integrity.

Sources Consulted

Interview with Alice Puerala by Elizabeth Balanoff

Harold Gibbons from Wikipedia

Alice Peurala Regains Reins Of Steel Union Local By James Warren.

Alice Peurala, 58, Steel Union Leader By James Warren

The Role of Management in the Decline of the American Steel Industry by Robert E. Ankli and Eva Sommer

Chicago’s Southeast Side Industrial History by Rod Sellers

Union women: forging feminism in the United Steelworkers of America by Mary Margaret Fonow

Rusted dreams: hard times in a steel community by David Bensman, Roberta Lynch

Rocking the Boat: Union Women’s Voices by Brigid O’Farrell & Joyce L. Kornbluh

If you drive down I-55 or I-80 out of Chicago toward Joliet, they are hard to miss. Sprawling boxy-looking buildings, often windowless, but with constant activity as semi’s pull up to disgorge their contents. These are the warehouses of Will County, where goods meant mostly for North America’s big box stores are routed to their ultimate destinations. They employ thousands of people, mostly people of color, many of them immigrants. It is one of the largest and fasting growing USA centers for product distribution by truck and rail.

It was among those warehouses that Uylonda Dickerson, a single mom, found a job. What she did not find was respect. Not only was the pay rock-bottom, but when she reported for work, she was often sent home instead, because there was not enough to do. This is in direct violation of Illinois law, making it a case of wage theft. If workers are scheduled to work, but are sent home, the company must pay them at least 4 hours of wages. 

Uylonda Dickerson sometimes did not receive hourly pay, but was paid by piecework, the hated system used by the sweatshops of the early 20th century. Piecework meant being paid according to the many trailers that she unloaded, a race against time to empty them, resulting in higher stress levels and a greater possibility of injury. Despite the mental and physical hazards of piecework, she received no health benefits, sick days or vacation time.

A Will County warehouse

Uylonda Dickerson endured sexual harassment, constant pain and eventually developed a bladder infection because the womens’ bathroom was so far away and using it angered her supervisors. Although the boxes that she unloaded were bound for Walmart, she did not work directly for Walmart, but for a temp agency. Her mind and body driven to the limits of exhaustion, she eventually quit and lived on public assistance, accompanied by the aches, pains and migraines that came from working in the Walmart empire, an empire that has no respect for hard work.

Welcome to the warehouse gulags of Will County. In Stalinist Russia, gulag meant the system of forced labor camps where prisoners were worked to the point of exhaustion and even death. In the area around Joliet, Illinois with its official unemployment rate of 9.6%, workers are often forced to take these low paying warehouse jobs just to survive. The stress and physical hazards associated with an inhuman work pace take their toll and can shave years off of a person’s life. Unlike a Soviet gulag, people are always free to leave , but the punishment can be even worse poverty. Uylonda Dickerson ended up in a house without electricity and running water.

It is the temporary workers who have the worst of it. The median wage for warehouse temps is $9 an hour while direct hires make $3.48 more. The majority of Will County warehouse workers are below the federal poverty line. One study calculated a living wage in Will County for a family of four to be $15.87, above what most warehouse workers make.

Chris Williams,an attorney who handles many legal cases for aggrieved Will County warehouse workers believes that wage theft may cost the nation millions in lost workers’ pay, thus increasing company profits. He focuses lawsuits against the temp agencies that service Walmart and distance it from the many abuses. Williams says

“I believe Walmart is experimenting…You’ll see temp agencies that supervise temp agencies that deal with temp agencies. It just adds another level of distance.”

There is a heavy turnover of temps as they often have to move from warehouse to warehouse, making it hard to establish relationships with other workers and with management, relationships that can be important for career advancement. One veteran teamster who took one of these non-union jobs to survive thinks that this a deliberate policy. Uncertain schedules make it more complicated to arrange for doctors’ appointments, school visits and proper leisure time, damaging both individual and family life. It also makes it difficult to organize for better wages and conditions through unionization.

Workers at a Sony distribution center meet to discuss grievances

Some will say with sneering contempt that, “Those people are lucky to have a job.” This  is thinly disguised racism since most Will County warehouse workers are people of color. Others will say it with more good will, but with condescending pity and a sigh of relief, “Better them than me.”

The Will County Center for Economic Development issued a glowing report about the future of Will County’s warehouse industry, but did mention possible environmental and traffic congestion problems. No mention though of the tax breaks to attract corporations, the fact that many warehouse workers rely on public assistance, or the generally poor quality of the jobs that have been generated.

All of this demonstrates a profound contempt for hard work in a nation that claims to revere it. When it comes to job creation, we set the bar way too low, especially considering how much wealth flows to the top.

Monica Morales of Warehouse Workers for Justice(WWJ) certainly agrees that we could be doing better. 

“If it wasn’t for us, none of the stuff you have in your house would be in your house,”says Monica Morales, a former worker at a warehouse for Bissell, the vacuum cleaner maker. “€œThere’s not many items that we don’t touch.€”

Demonstration for justice at a Bissels distribution center

Morales was fired in 2009  because she was among 70 workers who filed charges against labor contractor Maersk Logistics for civil rights, minimum wage and labor law violations. Maersk is a global Danish-based conglomerate with over 100,000 employees in 130 countries. Warehouse Workers for Justice is a group of warehouse workers with a crowded office in Joliet who take on some of the largest and most powerful corporations on the planet.

No one expects Warehouse Workers for Justice to win easy victories, but it has had successes by using the courts combined with worker solidarity and organizing community support. WWJ recently filed suit against a company contracted to food giant Tyson for forcing employees to work an extra 45 minutes without pay, a form of wage theft. This is only the most recent in a series of lawsuits. In another case Latino workers alleged racial discrimination when they were fired. After a large group of Latino community leaders visited and threatened a boycott, the workers were rehired.

Warehouse Workers for Justice is sponsored by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers a union with a history dating back to 1936. Once one of the largest unions in the USA, it was hit by red-baiting during the McCarthy period. It evolved into a much smaller, but member-driven democratic labor organization. It organized the Republic Windows and Doors plant occupation that caught the world’s attention in 2008.

Uylonda Dickerson, who quit her warehouse job for health reasons, is an enthusiastic member of WWJ:

“We talk amongst ourselves to see what we can do better. We make each other feel good, because we might be down and out. If you can go sit down and talk with strangers that feel like family to you, that makes a big difference.”

WWJ is part of a nationwide movement of labor organizations who work outside of the National Labor Relations Board traditional model. In our labor-hostile economy with its primitive labor laws and uncertain enforcement, workers are experimenting with new ways of winning victories and gaining the respect that is in such short supply. It is unclear where this movement is going, but one can find evidence of it across the country. Even some AFL-CIO unions support it in the hope that will eventually rejuvenate our now battered and shrinking labor movement.

Cornel West and Tavis Smiley visit Warehouse Workers for Justice

The warehouses of Will County are only a part of a vast supply chain of exploited labor that begins in the 21st century of sweatshops of China, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia and other developing countries and then goes through the USA to the shelves of the big box stores with their underpaid and distressed retail workers. Is this the only way to do modern manufacturing and distribution? Is this how we respect hard work?

And do we really need ALL of this manufactured stuff, given the human unhappiness that accompanies it? Some of the stuff is useful, but how much of it is wasteful production that unnecessarily harms our environment, and misuses valuable resources? How much valuable time and human labor is lost that could go toward better purposes? How much of this stuff is simply filling a consumer products addiction among people bereft of sufficient human connection and spiritual fulfillment?  These are hard questions we need to be asking, not just for the benefit of the warehouse workers of Will County, but for ourselves as well.

Warehouse Workers for Justice office

Cartoon by Carol Simpson CartoonWork

Sources Consulted

The New Blue Collar: Temporary Work, Lasting Poverty And The American Warehouse by Dave Jaimeson

Illinois County Unemployment Rate Rankings

Wal-Mart Warehouse Workers File Class Action Wage Theft Lawsuit by Kari Lyderson

Wage theft lawsuit against a Walmart distributor from Crain’s Chicago Business

Warehouse Workers for Justice

Bad Jobs in Goods Movement by Warehouse Workers for Justice & the  Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago

Will County Center for Economic Development

Chicago Warehouse Workers Navigate Maze of Contractors to Organize by Jane Slaughter

Our WalmartGroup maintaining fight for fair labor by Cindy Wojdyla Cain

Work stress and risk of cardiovascular mortality: prospective cohort study of industrial employees by Mika Kivimaki and others

Republicans are very good at confusing people about the economy. Our economic problems are variously blamed on immigrants, blacks, liberals, environmentalists, unions, China, Democrats, women, government regulation or whatever else is the GOP flavor of the week. Conspicuously absent from this are the very wealthy who actually dominate the US economy.

 Republicans say that if we only stick to the tried and true policies of their dear departed Ronald Reagan, all will come up roses.  But it’s the 1% who get the blooms, the rest of us get the thorns. 

 When it comes to Republican economics, failure is not an option. It’s a requirement. Republican economics means millions of Americans fail to get adequate health care, adequate housing, adequate education, adequate retirement, adequate recreation and adequate…well, you can finish the list if you have a few hours to spare. 

 What makes this saga even sadder, is that some Democrats have bought into this GOP economic calamity. Whether out of conviction, ignorance or to please their corporate sponsors they have left the rest of us embedded with the thorns, not the blooms. Democratic hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was no radical, would be appalled.

 You can read the GOP battle plan for this economic blitzkrieg in Believe In America: Mitt Romney’s Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth, a 160 page tome you can download for free. Now we all know that campaign literature bears only a passing resemblance to actual reality. Orwellian Newspeak is the coin of the campaign realm. But Romney is the candidate of the Republican establishment, itself a major representative for a large sector of Corporate America. So with careful study of how they want to mislead us, we can gain insight into ruling class thinking

 In the Sherlock Holmes tale The Silver Blaze, there is the curious incident of the watchdog who failed to bark, leading Holmes to finally crack the case. Sometimes it is what is unsaid that is the most revealing. That is certainly true of Believe in America.

There is no mention of dismantling our vast expensive and immoral military empire, which is essentially a government subsidy to military contractors, energy companies and other global corporations who depend upon the cheap labor and resources of the developing world. Meanwhile it is the working class who fights the wars and suffers the deaths and injuries that inevitably come.

 As for energy policy, there is worshipful adoration for the oil, coal, nuclear and gas industries; no mention however of BP and the Gulf of Mexico, Massey Energy and mine disasters, Fukushima radiation leaks, or Chesapeake Energy’s recent fracking blowout; no mention of the poisoning of the environment; the deaths caused by air and water pollution or the potential for an apocalypse of climate change. Alternative green energy sources  are dismissed as expensive, uncompetitive and undeserving of taxpayer support; no mention however of the epic subsidies doled out to oil, coal, nuclear and natural gas.

 To deal with global trade, Romney wants to create a “Reagan Economic Zone” that would be a massive Free Trade Agreement(FTA). Not mentioned is how an FTA like  NAFTA brought severe poverty to rural Mexico and caused a mass migration to the USA, breaking up families and condemning those Mexican workers to low wage jobs under sweatshop conditions; no mention either about the loss of US jobs thanks to NAFTA. 

 Reagan’s support of Latin American terrorist death squads and military dictatorships to insure “free market” economies also goes unmentioned. Although the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (signed by the USA) details  basic global labor standards, the “Reagan Economic Zone” is silent on those as well. Using the term “free markets” when workers are tossed into prison, tortured and even killed makes a mockery of both the word “free” and the word “market”.

 Tax policy? Romney says cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations because well, “corporations are people”. No mention about how we are to fund social welfare, more important than ever as companies rid themselves of pensions, health plans, family time, sick leave and the other necessities of a civilized society. 

 Healthcare? Repeal Obamacare. There is no mention that the Affordable Care Act is based on the popular Massachusetts health plan created by none other Mitt Romney; no mention of the skyrocketing costs and bloated inefficiency of the health insurance industry, which kills thousands of Americans every year through brutal rationing of health care. 

 Regulatory policy?  Easy, slash regulation of Wall Street; no mention of how deregulation brought on the 2008 crash; robbing people of pensions, homes and jobs; no mention of how environmental regulation has prevented even greater ecological tragedy; no mention of how OSHA has helped save life and limb in the workplace.

 Believe in America makes no mention of the vast disparity in wealth between the 1% and the working class; barely a mention of our racial and gender caste system that economically punishes people based on their color and the configuration of their reproductive organs.

 When it comes to actual working class realities, the silences can be deafening. However there is one area of working class life where Romney is quite vocal. Unions, always a favorite whipping boy for economic failure, get a special flogging in Believe in America.

 After a perfunctory paragraph about unions of the past, unions today are pilloried for harming competiveness, driving up costs and being detrimental to job creation. Romney attacks the National Labor Relations Board for decisions that favor labor while ignoring those that have favored management. Even a minor decision that requires employers to put up posters advising workers of their legal rights stokes his ire. While he claims to be in favor of “competiveness”, he vents rage at anything that might help the embattled US labor movement maintain its competiveness in our so-called “free market” economy. 

 Romney seems offended that working class people aspire to a modest middle class lifestyle and is especially outraged at those who have achieved that status through union activity. It’s OK in Romney World for wealthy investors to organize companies to further their financial gain, but a mortal economic sin for working class people to organize unions to do the same.

 Romney gushes over the so-called “right-to-work” states which place heavier restrictions on unions, where union organizing efforts meet a stonewall of employer resistance and even many working class people are anti-union. Concentrated in the American South, these states are also among the poorest in the nation with all of the attendant social problems. There has been significant job growth there as manufacturing companies seek out the cheapest labor and the most desperate people. These companies generally pay low wages while demanding expensive government subsidies and tax breaks. Working conditions can be brutal while worker health and safety takes a back seat.

 But despite the many words Romney expends on labor issues there are still long silences. There is no mention of the predatory capitalists who descended on US manufacturing and instead of investing in new technology and engaging workers in planning a better future, simply skimmed off the profits until bankruptcy struck. There is no mention of company owners who simply skipped town to find cheaper labor in impoverished 3rd World countries so they could go back to the robber baron-style of labor relations popular in the 19th century. 

 There is no mention of how the labor movement has been the USA’s most successful anti-poverty program; no mention of how unions made deep concessions to help companies stay in business during economic crisis; no mention of the thousands of workers fired illegally for union organizing; no mention of the union role in fighting against racial, gender and other forms of discrimination on the job.

When you add up the words of Believe in America and its many silences, the true picture of Republican economic planning becomes clear. It is a picture of failure for the many and success for the few. The Republican idea of job creation is the Walmartization of America, low wage jobs with minimal benefits. Even the higher paying non-union manufacturing jobs brought in by companies like  BMW and Daimler are still low by the standards of the companys’ home countries. Unfunny jokes about the USA becoming Europe’s  Mexico are making the rounds.

 Romney wants to slash Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In his vision of a non-union low wage economy, how will workers retire or pay for medical care?  Already many Walmart workers depend upon public assistance programs like SNAP (formerly food stamps), housing subsidies, child health programs and Medicaid.

 In Romney’s low wage America where taxes are slashed for the wealthy and the corporations, who will pay for schools, essential public services, infrastructure maintainenance, parks and recreational facilities? How will we pay for environmental protection and cleanup? Public health programs? Food safety inspection? Workplace health and safety inspections? Corporate and government financial fraud audits?

 Mitt Romney’s deregulated capitalism makes it too easy for the grifters, the thieves, the polluters and the labor exploiters to succeed in business. It rewards those who dismantled our manufacturing, polluted our nation, foreclosed our homes and damned near crashed the entire global economy in 2008. 

This undercuts the honest fair-minded capitalists who have a sense of responsibility to their workers, their investors and to society as a whole. Being a capitalist should be seen as a serious social responsibility, not a smash and grab robbery as it is by the Mitt Romney’s of America.

 Believe in America is the road to perdition: a red, white and blue environmentally blighted Mordor; dotted with grim sweatshops surrounded by decaying slums and ruled from the office towers and  fortress-like gated communities of the wealthy.

 If economic failure is a requirement for Republicans, resistance is the requirement for the rest of us. For if we do not resist, we can  only say, “We did it to ourselves.”

Sources consulted

 Books

 Believe In America: Mitt Romney’s Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth

 Griftopia by Matt Taibbi

 The Big Short by Michael Lewis

 Articles

 Orwellian from Wikipedia

Silver Blaze  from Wikipedia

 Reagan’s legacy in Latin America marked by obsession, failure by Juan Prada

Mitt Romney’s Epic Health Care Journey: How He Flip-Flopped On Mandates by Benjy Sarlin

 45,000 American deaths associated with lack of insurance by Madison Park

Unionbusting? That’s disgusting! from USAction

Dropping the Ax: Illegal Firings During Union Election Campaigns by John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer

Germany turns out 5.5 million cars; U.S. only 2.7 million by Nicholas Maronese

Next Low-Wage Haven: USA by Jane Slaughter

 Hidden Cost of Wal-Mart Jobs by Arindrajit Dube and Ken Jacobs

But seriously, if Wall Street brokers actually wrote poetry, what kind of poetry would they write? What form of verse would best express their singleminded devotion to felonious assault on the economy? To speculate about that we first need to understand the culture of Wall Street criminality… 

According to anthropologist Karen Ho, Wall Street thrives on short term crisis, partially because actual employment is so insecure. People get fired all the time. Entire departments get liquidated. So the idea is to gamble ferociously on short term gain in the hopes of getting a big bonus. Because who the hell knows if you will even be around next week?

With everyone protecting their own asses, there is little loyalty among Wall Streeters to their bosses or to each other. Sociologist Richard Sennett describes it this way:

Isolation is the obvious enemy of cooperation. In management jargon, it’s called the silo effect. Workers in silos — defined by rigid, top-down management structures – - communicate poorly with one another.

On Wall Street, however, I found that isolation is often self-imposed. Old hands blame it on the advent of computer work: People stare at their screens rather than talk to one another. They also say e-mail diminishes cooperation. “I’d send a message to the girl three work stations away,” said a woman doing account reconciliation, “rather than walk over to her.”

The mid-level people in front of their computers often develop a sense of contempt for those above them as they put in their 100 hour work weeks, sometimes sleeping in their cars.  Because the higher up you go, the less the top management actually understands the complex algorithms and financial gyrations that their underlings fiddle with.  

And to a large degree, top management doesn’t feel they need to know or even want to know. While the ranks of Wall Street have diversified to some degree, the higher up you go, the whiter and more male it becomes and the more privileged arrogance you find. Who cares how its done and at what cost? Just do it. There is little oversight or sense of responsibility within the workplace, much less a sense of responsibility to society.

After some googling around, I discovered Michael Silverstein. While not a stockbroker, he does write verse about Wall Street, was an editor at Bloomberg Financial News, writes econ textbooks, and apparently knows what derivatives are. I had found an authentic Wall Street Poet. Not only does he do verse in his own humorous style, but he parodies poetic luminaries from W.H. Auden to W.B. Yeats.

Our cartoon alters the famous lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” How do I love thee, let me count the ways…”, but Silverstein rewrote the entire poem. Here is an excerpt:

Where Went The Nasdaq?

Where went the Nasdaq? Let me chart its fall.
It fell ‘cause stocks were sold for flaky deals
With concept hype, but profit futures slight
By hucksters reaching for a graceless buck.
It fell when folks woke to the lesson trite
That PE not BS, stock prices ignite.

Silverstein is not writing a Homer’s Iliad celebrating the valor of stockbrokers marching off to financial battle. He’s more of a Dante who put the avaricious in the 4th circle of Hell and the fraudulent in the 8th circle.

The greedy in Dante’s Hell pushing huge sacks of money



Silverstein is also a keen observer of Wall Streeters’ personal peccadilloes and unpleasant habits in this excerpt from a poem in the tradition of Robert Frost:

Whose got the cash we think we know,
To make this shaky deal go
But rumors fly he’s often prone
To stuff his nostrils full of blow.

My firm to risk is not adverse
We know the pangs of sharp reverse
In arbitrage you take some lumps
When playing markets quite diverse.

My partners, though, now have the shakes
They think this guy makes bad mistakes
It’s said his magic touch has fled
A victim, too, of coca flakes.

Wall Street is a hot house of infantile instant gratification where anything goes. Should we be surprised that cocaine, strip clubs and prostitutes are as much a part  of Wall Street as the daily market reports? Kristin Davis was a New York madame who estimates that about half of her high end clients were from Wall Street’s biggest firms, coming to her with company credit cards and requests for Lamborghini’s to drive around their highly paid “dates”.


According to Andrew Lo of MIT:

Recently, neuroscientists have done experiments where they’ve taken individuals and put them into an MRI machine. And they have them play a game where the prize is money. And they noticed that when these subjects earn money, the part of the brain that gets stimulated is the same part that cocaine stimulates.

Wall Streeters feel pressured to participate in this culture of bacchanal excess to get promoted and gain recognition. One broker was so disgusted by the whole sorry scene that he sued his company because he was asked to provide prostitutes to his clients, in short, to become a highly paid pimp for expensive call girls.

With a corporate culture that makes the decadent excesses of Ancient Rome look like Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, should we be surprised that Wall Streeters wiped out nearly 50 trillion dollars of global wealth? 


Michael Silverstein’s verse is in a witty literary style, but what if one is looking for something in the musical tradition? I think Wall Street needs a “gangsta rapper” or should we say, “banksta rapper”. Gangsta rappers have been reciting popular poetry about the culture of criminal economic enterprises for years. Who could be more qualified to put Wall Street to music?

Bling? Check. Fancy cars? Check. Outrageous risk taking? Check. Job insecurity? Check. Dope? Check. Misogyny? Check. Destruction of entire communities? Check. Lack social responsibility? Check. Birds of a feather if you ask me.

Kids who go to the elite prep schools and elite colleges can aspire to become the financial “big swinging dicks” of The Street, armed with their laptops and outsize sense of entitlement. Kids in the impoverished neighborhoods of urban America have the big-time hustlers to look up to, peddling dope and sex, armed with Glocks, Tech-9’s and a fatalistic sense about their own mortality.

The modern economy of drugs in America’s cities rests on the ruins of those good paying unionized manufacturing jobs that were wiped out with the eager assistance of Wall Street. The destruction of manufacturing shifted power from the “real economy” to the “casino economy” of The Street as well as the drug economy of the streets.

Check out this excerpt from the Notorious B.I.G. and tell me there aren’t similarities between gangstas and bankstas:

Being broke is childish and I’m quite grown
Run up in the club with the ice on, me and Paisan
Scope the spot out, see somethin nice and I’m gone
You cats is home, screaming the fight’s on
I’m in the fifteen hundred seats, watching Ty-son
Same night, same fight
But one of us cats ain’t playing right, I let you tell it
People place yourselves in the shoes of two felons
And tell me you won’t ball every chance you get
and any chance you hit, we live for the moment
Makes sense don’t it? Now make dollars
Cats pop bottles bone chicks that favor Idalis
And rack up frequent flier mileage

Gotta let it show, I love the dough, hey
I love the dough, more than you know
Gotta let it show, I love the dough, hey

Oh? You say that at least Wall Streeters don’t kill people like those lowlife ghetto thugs? Really? Armed with their Thinkpads, Lenovos and Toshibas, Wall Streeters can drive up commodity prices like corn and wheat and push millions into starvation. They can bring entire nations to their knees and deny clean water, shelter and health care to millions more. Your run of the mill street corner tough can only marvel at that kind of destructive power.

There are differences of course. Most urban gangstas do real prison time. That’s rare among the Wall Street bankstas.

As poet and sage Bob Dylan taught us,” Money doesn’t talk, it swears.”

Note: The cartoon above was done by Carol Simpson CartoonWork, a collaboration of Estelle Carol and Bob “Bobbosphere” Simpson.

Sources Used

Griftopia by Matt Taibbi

Inside Job by Charles Ferguson

Wall Street Poet Michael Silverstein’s Satirical Verse

An Anthropologist on What’s Wrong with Wall Street by Barbara Kiviat

The Culture of Wall Street by Karen Ho

In Wall Street’s Back Offices, Loyalty Is Lost by Richard Sennett

A Christmas Message From America’s Rich by Matt Taibbi

He looked up at the panhandler with a threatening expression on his face. The badly frightened panhandler quickly backed out on to the sidewalk. I got up and walked out the door.  I caught up with panhandler who warily took my dollar. He still looked pretty scared, but was composed enough to thank me. As I walked back into Ben and Jerry’s, Mr. Cell Phone looked up and said,” He’s just going to come back you know.” I didn’t even look at him and said quietly, “Yeah, well that’s his problem.”

Oak Park Ben and Jerry’s
 

 Didn’t Mr. Cell Phone know that Ben and Jerry’s was founded by two good hearted people?  Being heartless in a Ben and Jerry’s was a Newt Gingrich moment, especially around Christmas time. Honestly though, my decision to give the panhandler the dollar was not based solely on human compassion. I was really pissed at Mr. Cell Phone and figured that was the best way to stick it to him. His disrespect and implied threats had pushed my buttons.

This happened in the liberal Village of Oak Park IL where the Village government and the business community wants panhandlers to disappear. Mr. Cell Phone was saying in his blunt and nasty way what the local business community wants too. Get the hell out.

Pat Zubak, president of Downtown Oak Park, a local business association, was quite frank about the economic reasons as reported by our local paper, Wednesday Journal:

“I get asked for money every single day, and it’s unpleasant every single day,” said Zubak. “You feel like people have invaded your space. I am concerned about tourists and people who are shopping — what kind of impressions they have of Oak Park. I’ve seen the tourist buses pull up at Unity Temple and people getting off the bus — and the panhandlers are waiting right there.”

Pat Zubak of Downtown Oak Park  was especially concerned about panhandlers being around for the holiday shopping season.The irony of running off panhandlers in a holiday season supposedly devoted to generosity and giving seems lost on Ms. Zubak. Downtown Oak Park’s solution is to hand out palm cards to panhandlers with the contact information of local social service agencies. Give palm cards, not cash.

The Palm Card

 

The message about helping those in need was framed in an odd way though. At a community meeting, the case of Lester Davidson was brought up as an example of a typical Oak Park panhandler. Davidson has been arrested 70 times.  He assaulted an Oak Park man in 2010 and was prosecuted for it. But Oak Park panhandlers rarely assault people. We do have violent street robberies in Oak Park, but they are committed by your garden variety street thugs. And what about the safety of Oak Park’s panhandlers? Branding them as dangerous criminals only makes their street life more precarious. And what possible good could come from sending supposed “dangerous criminals” to a shelter or a food pantry?

Downtown Oak Park
across from the Ben and Jerry’s

 

The palm cards with their list of helpful agencies might be useful to new Oak Park panhandlers, but even the neophytes are out there for the money and the Oak Park regulars are well aware of where to seek help. The cards are really to assuage the consciences of the non-panhandling Oak Park population and discourage them from giving money.

Oak Park’s liberal reputation comes mainly from its storied past. Back in the 1970’s, when neighborhood re-segregation was happening all over Chicagoland, Oak Park stood up for racial desegregation. It is still a desegregated community, but not exactly an integrated community. There is a racial achievement gap in the schools. Forums about race in the community always reveal examples of discrimination, both obvious and institutional. But by US standards, Oak Park could do far worse.



It is in the area of social class where the boundaries of Oak Park’s supposed “liberalism” are most obvious.  In a non-binding referendum, Village residents overwhelming favored a Living Wage ordinance. The Village government, under pressure from the business community, refused to pass an ordinance. The Village government is also on a privatization crusade to eliminate decent paying public sector jobs and outsource them to private contractors. Some of these jobs are unionized. New housing is heavily weighted toward upscale condos when Oak Park needs more affordable housing for its working class population.

Panhandlers are not the only people with economic problems in “liberal” Oak Park.

A police crackdown could reduce the Oak Park panhandling population, but the cops are wary about actually doing that. A police state in Downtown Oak Park would be expensive, unpleasant and the target of civil liberties lawsuits. Oak Park cop Mike Mangaser said this at a community meeting, “If someone asks you for money, they are within their First Amendment rights. “We’re looking at the assaults, when they start yelling and calling you names.” Oak Park cops already have plenty to do, as can be seen in the police blotter published in the local newspaper.


Official repression of panhandlers demands considerable attention and resources. In Tudor England, panhandlers , called “sturdy beggars”, were subjected to forced labor, the stocks, whipping, branding and even execution. Continued revisions of English Poor Laws suggest that even these severe punishments did not alleviate the problem. England was undergoing serious economic upheaval with parallels to today. Poverty was a severe. Very severe.

People will do what they have to do to survive in an economically depressed society. Unless you like living in a police state, panhandlers are here to stay unless conditions change—big time.

Sturdy Beggar Being Whipped

 

Oak Park resident John Hubbuch said this,”Panhandlers are a part of society. We need to see them. They are our dark mirror. They are reminders that but for God, luck or fate go us.” We live in a badly broken dysfunctional economy and panhandlers are a stark reminder of that.

But I would go much further than John Hubbuch. If the Oak Park business community is so damned concerned with panhandlers, why didn’t they offer public support to Occupy Wall Street, a movement that wants an economy that minimizes the poverty. Except for a few banks and chain stores, the Oak Park business community is Main Street, not Wall Street. Why doesn’t our business community throw its weight behind a living wage ordinance and labor law reform? Minimize poverty and you minimize the need for panhandling. Maximize working class income and you have more paying customers. You’re business people for cryin’ out loud. Do the math. 


Why don’t they raise hell about the drastic cuts in mental health centers and other social services?  People with serious personal problems are less likely to end up on the street if they have better alternatives.


As for Mr. Cell Phone and other Oak Park residents who insult and disrespect panhandlers, homeless people and poor people in general, heed the words of John Hubbuch above. Don’t think it can’t happen to you. The economy could get a lot worse and you could be the scared newbie on the streets. So you’d be wise to check out How to Panhandle for emergency advice in case you ever need it. If you don’t want to give money to panhandlers, fine. But keep your insults and disrespect to yourself. Life on the streets is hard enough as it is.

If someone hassles you on the street in a threatening manner or assaults you, by all means report it if you are willing to show up in court. But it is unlikely that your assailant will be a panhandler.

Personally, I try to carry a small supply of dollar bills with me and hand them to panhandlers until I run out.  I’ve been doing it for years, although business has picked up since the 2008 crash. If they outlaw panhandling, then I’ll have to be an outlaw donor. 

In all my years of doling out modest sums of money around Chicagoland, I’ve only been threatened by panhandler once. He didn’t get a dime from me. He eventually went to jail for assaulting an El passenger.

I wish there were a way to punish society’s most dangerous panhandlers though. You know, the ones who slip out of their K Street offices and panhandle Congress for millions in order to profit off war, environmental destruction, labor exploitation, poisonous food and a long list of other crimes.

Could we bring back the stocks for them? Maybe just for a day while they await further sentencing? The YouTube video would be priceless.

Sources Consulted:

“Taking a closer look at panhandling in Oak Park” Wednesday Journal, November 29, 2011

“Oak Park to discourage giving cash to panhandlers” Chicago Tribune November 22, 2011

“Don’t pin it on the panhandlers.” Wednesday Journal, November 29, 2011

“Coming face to face to face with poverty” Wednesday Journal, November 29, 2011

“Figuring out Oak Park’s living wage ordinance” Wednesday Journal, August 18, 2009

“Village of Oak Park may outsource legal staff” Wednesday Journal, December 13, 2011

Rogues, vagabonds, & sturdy beggars by Arthur F. Kinney

“We need panhandlers” by John Hubbuch December 16, 2011.

Edmonton Panhandling Study by Joshua Freistadt

Stronger Than Dirt: Public Humiliation and Status Enhancement among Panhandlers by Stephen E. Lankanau

Panhandling by Michael S. Scott, US Department of Justice

Deborah Goldring has a multitude of problems. After losing her job as a hospital executive assistant, she received a foreclosure letter from the bank. After 30 years, she was faced with loss of her home. She had already lost her husband from a fatal illness and had lost their modest life savings to nursing home costs.

Driven from the middle class by economic forces beyond her control, she was now in poverty and facing possible homelessness.

In the wake of the 2008 economic crash, Mrs. Goldring was not alone. There were many stories like hers across the nation.

But Deborah Goldring grew up black in 1960‘s segregated Baltimore, where northern and southern racism met, creating a unique border-state Jim Crow. Her family had been desperately poor, evicted multiple times from apartments and reduced to stealing electricity.

But thanks to the civil rights movement and federal intervention, there were more opportunities for black people when she arrived at adulthood and she was able to enter the middle class through hard work and single-minded determination. Then 2008 came along and the bottom fell out.

“For me to live that life we were so comfortable in, we never had to worry about finances, we always had money where I can help my kids and my grandchildren — to go to calling my daughter to borrow $100 because I can’t pay a bill …” Goldring’s voice trails off as she struggles to hold back tears.

According to conservative dogma, we live in a post-racial society. Mentioning Mrs. Goldring’s color is considered playing the race card, making a false or exaggerated claim of discrimination for political gain. No one called her nasty racial names. No one stood at the hospital door and screamed that clerical jobs were now “white only.” No one spat on her when they delivered her foreclosure notice. Her story is sad, but it could happen to anyone. According to conservatives, there is no need to drag the divisive issue of race into it and stir up trouble.

Her story could happen to anyone, but it happens more frequently if your skin is dark. The cold driving rain of recession does not fall on the USA equally. White unemployment as of December 2010 was 8.5%. Black unemployment was 15.8%, while latino unemployment was 13%. For every dollar of white income, blacks earn 57 cents and latinos earn 59 cents. The average white net worth is 20 times that of blacks and 18 times that of latinos.

Marc Morial, president of the the Urban League has stated, ” …that the widening wealth gap between whites and minorities has wiped out gains made over that last 30 years and could foreshadow even more inequality if something isn’t done to address it.”

So like climate change and evolution, those other realities that are often denied by conservatives, racism is very real. In fact racism has undergone its own Darwinian evolution. Old fashioned in-your-face racial epithets are no longer socially acceptable. A black celebrity like Oprah can become a billionaire with millions of devoted fans. The Republicans even flirted with a black presidential candidate until he flamed out.

But in the area of economics, institutional racism still rules the American dollar. A term originally coined by the late Stokley Carmichael (Kwame Toure) here is a definition of institutional racism:

In the United States, institutional racism results from the social caste system that sustained, and was sustained by, slavery and racial segregation. Although the laws that enforced this caste system are no longer in place, its basic structure still stands to this day. This structure may gradually fall apart on its own over a period of generations, but activism is necessary to expedite the process and provide for a more equitable society in the interim.

American racism has been an intimate partner of American capitalism since the beginning of this nation. Did anyone seriously think they could be pulled asunder by a few civil rights laws? Institutional racism is alive and well and being carefully guarded by conservatives. It is truly…racism’s last stand.

Deborah Goldring’s generation consisted of the baby boomer children of blacks who had lived through the Great Depression. But the gains of the New Deal era labor uprisings that helped create the modern middle class went mostly to whites, as blacks were normally excluded from the better paying jobs. Domestic workers and farmworkers, then mostly black, were denied Social Security and the protection of labor laws.

The GI Bill that made college education and low interest home loans available to World War II veterans was not applied equally. Many colleges and universities were still segregated and blacks were excluded from segregated white suburbs. Conservative Republicans and racist Democrats teamed up to pass the post WWII Taft-Hartley Act, aimed directly at the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The CIO had a daring plan to organize southern workers across racial lines, raise wages for all and smash segregation through combined working class action. Instead it was the CIO who got smashed by the intense government repression.

Employment segregation was reinforced by separate newspaper ads for white and black workers. Throughout the 1950’s while working class whites were making spectacular economic gains, black economic advancement was slow or stalled.

The civil rights movement of the 1960‘s opened up new opportunities for blacks and other people of color that had never existed before. But there was also a dangerous racial backlash from whites who feared economic competition, especially when affirmative action was used to desegregate jobs previously barred to people of color.

Beginning with the Reagan years, enforcement of equal employment laws withered, which only encouraged racist employers to keep jobs as white as possible. Even today a resume or rental application sent in with names like Keisha or Malik will more likely be rejected than ones with the names Karen or Mike.

Blacks had finally reached higher level unionized industrial jobs in the 1970’s. But during the Reagan years, US manufacturing workers were devastated by de-industrialization and attacks on unions.
This was especially devatastingfor blacks who frequently had less seniority when waves of layoffs swept through entire industries.

Because private employment was traditionally more racist than public employment, many blacks had gone into government jobs. Beginning with the Reagan years, these jobs were under constant attack by conservatives as if teachers, firefighters, cops, sanitation workers, nurses and other public servants were the cause of the USA’s growing economic problems.

When the Crash of 2008 came along, whites were better able to weather it because of their greater accumulated wealth and more secure employment. Whatever motivated conservatives to attack government social programs, enforcement of civil rights laws, unions, affirmative action, or public employees, the axe always fell heaviest on racial minorities. That is the cold hard reality of institutional racism. Whatever their intent may be, that is the outcome of conservative public policy.

The corporation who laid off Deborah Goldring was not persecuting her for her race. The clerk who sent the foreclosure notice may have been a person of color. The politicians who had made her childhood and the life of her parents a Jim Crow hell are long dead. But that Jim Crow hell also left Deborah Goldring without the family capital and access to economic networks that gets people through hard times.

Because of institutional racism, whites are much more likely to have that kind of wherewithal.

In 2011, simply maintaining the economic status quo leaves these racial inequalities in place. But conservatives are not satisfied with that. They want to turn back the clock on everyone, but especially on people of color. This can also seen by the propaganda campaign they have been waging for decades. People of color have been stereotyped as welfare queens, criminals, drug abusers, terrorists, job stealers, and (paradoxically)too lazy to work. From Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to Reagan’s “welfare queens” and now Gingrich’s remarks about inner city residents having no work ethic, it never ends.

This propaganda campaign has had its effect. According to a Tufts University study, a substantial number of whites now believe they are more discriminated against than blacks, despite all evidence to the contrary. Through their control over the Republican Party, conservatives now have an even larger number of supporters for defending their bastion of institutional racism.

The combination of institutional racism and conservative propaganda has had its effect on American liberalism. Like the stolen document in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”, institutional racism is hidden in plain sight. It cannot be easily explained to white people because so much of it is invisible to them. It is especially difficult to explain when white people themselves are under so much economic pressure. It is so much easier for some whites to repeat the conservative propaganda that racial minorities are responsible for the economic disaster.

In this toxic class and racial atmosphere, many liberals fear raising or even trying to explain the complex issue of institutional racism and its many ill effects on American society. The conservative hue and cry of “playing the race card” is seen as dangerous to their political futures. So the leadership of modern liberalism, now housed in the Democratic Party, has largely gone silent. Even President Obama, the nation’s first black president, treats race like a melting Fukushima radioactive core, staying as far away from it as possible.

To seriously address the whole issue of these racial inequalities will require a massive social movement across racial lines and a government initiative greater than the New Deal. But isn’t that what we need to solve the economic crisis? Unless it is a movement and a government that openly and courageously addresses the inequalities of race, it is doomed to failure. It would be fighting with one hand tied behind its back against the greatest concentration of wealth in human history.

Deborah Goldring was lucky. She learned about a Maryland program that helps homeowners in trouble. The program was the the Emergency Mortgage Assistance program exactly the kind of government program that conservatives despise.

Financed by federal money, offered a zero-interest loan of up to $50,000. The money would pay off up to a year of back mortgage payments, plus up to two years of regular payments. All Goldring had to do was pay 31 percent of her current gross income, or the full mortgage payment if she got a new job close to her original salary.

Mrs. Goldring of Baltimore, Maryland has a reprieve. Now all she needs is a job. A huge public investment in the USA that recognizes the ongoing racial inequalities would certainly help her and so many others. Conservatives say that the private sector would do better. Oh really? The private sector stripped Baltimore of its industrial base, threw people out of work, offered subprime toxic loans as its solution to the housing crisis and left a behind a city that inspired the grim urban drama The Wire. Thanks, but no thanks.

Conservatives will also cry that such a program is “playing the race card”. Let them play their racial card games. The rest of the USA has work to do.

Sources consulted

When Affirmative Action Was White by Ira Katznelson

The Race Card by Richard Thompson Ford

“Black economic gains reversed in Great Recession” from USA Today

“State of the Dream 2011” from United for a Fair Economy

“Operation Dixie: Notes on a Promise Abandoned” by J.H. O’Dell

“Institutional Racism” by Tom Head

“Urban League: Black middle class losing ground by Russel Contreras

“Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?” by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan

“White People Face Worse Racism?” by Jenée Desmond-Harris

“An Inconvenient Truth for a Post-Racial President” by Lenny McAllister

I’m not much good at snappy comebacks, so here is what I would like to say in response to these individuals.

If you go around saying stuff like this, aren’t you just trying to conceal your own insecurities? You think you need people “below” you to prop up your self confidence, don’t you? You know in your heart that  you are just one lay-off, just one health problem or just one family tragedy away from poverty yourself. So overcome by fear, you adopt a worshipful attitude toward the wealthy 1% and their allies, hoping that you’ll be exempted from financial disaster.

But secretly, don’t you feel you feel a bit ashamed? I hope so, because that means you haven’t surrendered your humanity yet. So let’s talk about poor people. Maybe no poor person ever offered you a job, but it takes a lot of poor people to maintain an employer. In fact, let me  introduce you to some of the poor people who help keep employers in business.  

 The legendary reggae artist Bob Marley gave us some good advice. There are times when people do have to stand up for their rights. But there are also other times when it pays to sit down for your rights. In 1937, during one of the worst years of the Great Depression, sitting down for one’s rights was on the agenda for people across the nation.

 One of those places was a  Detroit Woolworth’s on a typical 1937 Saturday morning shopping day. Woolworth’s went out of business in the USA in 1996. But in 1937, it had an empire of over 2000 stores in the USA and Canada plus more in Cuba, the UK and Germany.  At precisely 11 am that February 27th, a union organizer named Fred Loew blew a loud whistle and began yelling “STRIKE! STRIKE!” Shouts and cheers could be heard as department by department the 150 “sales girls” stopped working and stood proudly with their arms folded. The sit-down strike against the USA’s most unpopular chain store had begun. 

 Woolworth’s was a Five and Dime, a variety store that was the Walmart of its day. It had ruthlessly put small mom and pop stores out of business by buying huge quantities of goods directly from factories and negotiating low prices in return for long term contracts. Founder  Frank Woolworth was an expert at finding cheap sweatshop and child labor in Europe. 

 A nationwide movement against the aggressive chain store tactics of Woolworth’s resulted in regulatory legislation and court battles. A protest letter from Indiana stated,

“The chain stores are undermining the foundations of our entire local happiness and prosperity. They have destroyed our home markets and merchants, paying a minimum to our local enterprises and charity, sapping the lifeblood from prosperous communities.” 

 A poll taken in 1936 showed that  69% of Americans polled were against the growth of big chains.  

 But it was the strike by the Detroit saleswomen that was the most dramatic challenge to the Woolworth empire. The striking saleswomen and their union organizers asked for a 10 cent an hour raise, the 8 hour day, time and half after 48 hours, seniority rights, a union hiring hall and no retaliation against workers after the strike. Store Manager William Mayer told them that he would consider their demands on Monday if they would please go home. The strikers were unmoved.

 The strikers were overwhelming young and white, though light-skinned African Americans sometimes passed as Italian or Spanish to get Woolworth jobs. Woolworth’s saleswomen were expected to be pert and engaging with the general public despite many hours of constant standing. One NYC Woolworth’s worker bought special shoes saying, “I don’t know how the other girls stand it. They get flat feel and fallen arches and little surface varicose veins.” There was little time for rests or breaks as the saleswomen were constantly harassed by managers and spies posing as customers. A woman’s “looks” counted heavily in promotions and some of the male managers demanded sexual favors for promotions and special treatment.

 The women were very aware that they were part of a larger movement. The new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was organizing workers across the country. The small and struggling United Auto Workers had just won the  long bitter Flint sit-down strike when General Motors agreed to recognize the union on February 11. In the wake of Flint, sit-downs and traditional strikes broke out all over the Detroit area. But the male dominated media was inevitably drawn to the young women strikers at Woolworth’s and they quickly became a national sensation.

Barbara Hutton

Despite the general dislike of the chain store’s ruthless economics, working class people were enthusiastic Woolworth’s shoppers. Unlike today’s soulless looking Walmart or Target, Woolworth’s had brightly painted columns,  winding stairs, attractive bins of inexpensive goods and smiling, helpful (if secretly exhausted) sales clerks. But the public loved the “working girls” of Woolworth’s, not the spoiled Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, whose Marie Antoinette excesses were well documented in the popular press. Reputed to be the world’s richest woman, she renounced her American citizenship to avoid paying taxes and moved to Europe.
The strikers loved to sing this song:

“Barbara Hutton’s got the dough, parlez vous.
We know where she got it, too, parlez vous.
We slave at Woolworth’s five and dime,
The pay we get is sure a crime.
Hinky dinky parlez vous”

 Family, friends and union supporters brought in blankets, mattresses, food and other supplies. The women organized committees and set out to have as much fun as they could, chatting among themselves, playing cards, dancing, knitting, doing makeup and phoning  boy friends and families. There was a special Cheer-Up Committee in charge of morale. Many of the young women lived with their families and had never spent a night away from home before. 

The women were very conscious of the press attention and carefully did their hair and makeup each morning. The press insisted in calling them “girls” and trivialized their struggle in that way. But paradoxically, their media image as fun loving girls was also a kind of protection.  It would be a PR disaster for the Woolworth’s management to call the cops and have them dragged out by force. The women carefully documented press coverage through their Scrapbook Committee. They were a lot more media savvy than even the media realized.

At first Woolworth’s management refused to negotiate. The strikers answered with a second Woolworth’s sit-down strike at another Detroit store and a promise of a national Woolworth’s sit-down if progress was not made. The Kresge’s chain, Woolworth’s biggest competitor, raised wages immediately. Hundreds of employers across the nation also raised wages in the hope of avoiding unionization and sit-down strikes. US Steel signed a major agreement with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee-CIO to avoid a costly shutdown.

The handwriting was on the wall for Woolworth’s and on the 7th day of the strike, management capitulated and gave in to the striker’s demands. The victory at Woolworth’s was followed by more sit-down strikes across the nation. 

 Even Broadway and Hollywood got into the act. A musical called Pins and Needles opened in 1938 and a movie comedy called The Devil and Miss Jones was released 3 years later. Both were based upon the wave of sit-down strikes by the saleswomen of America’s department and variety stores. Sadly,  there was no Hollywood ending for the the Detroit Woolworth workers. They eventually lost their contract when the company hired new, more docile employees, screening out pro-union workers in what was a high turnover industry.

 If all of this sounds like today’s Occupy Wall Street, it’s because there are striking similarities: the spontaneity, the rapid spread of the movement and the energetic youthful participants. But there are key differences. Among them is this: Occupy Wall Street has contested the use of public space, the Depression Era sit-downs  contested the use of private space .

Generations of corporate propaganda have imbued us with the idea that the workplace is strictly private property; a holy ground upon which we tread only at the sufferance of its owners.  If we don’t want to be expelled like Adam and Eve from the Garden, we must obey its divine commandments. Freedom of speech, assembly and the right to petition grievances melt way within its sacred environs. People who challenge the authority of this private control  of the work space are labeled troublemakers, radicals, communists…snakes in the garden who seek to seduce the innocent and lead them to temptation.

 The sit-down strikers had much different attitude. They looked at the workplace as a social contract. Because they invested their precious time and labor, they were as important as the capital that was also invested. If the owners were respectful, fair-minded and provided a reasonable return on investment of time and labor made by the workers, then there no need to contest the use of that private space with a sit-down strike. But if the owners failed to show the proper respect for the contributions of the employees, than it was time to teach the boss some proper manners.

 The years of terrible Depression hardships had removed much of capitalism’s luster, even for workers who had little sympathy for radical economics. Wall Street produced few good paying jobs, but did produce a fair number of socialists, communists and freelance radicals.  The sit-down strikes were often led by these workplace rebels and were an expression of an emerging workplace democracy, challenging the rigid totalitarian organization of the modern corporation.

 These workplace rebels also blamed the economic wreckage from the 1929 Crash for feeding the rise of totalitarian movements around the world, and propelling humanity toward global war. Economic collapse, totalitarianism and World War II were failures of capitalism that were hard to explain away.

 Any expression of workplace democracy aroused the most powerful fear and loathing from Wall Street and the Empire eventually struck back. The most powerful tools of the labor movement were banned. Sit-down strikes were declared illegal by the Supreme Court in 1939. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 put heavy restrictions on strikes and boycotts. Communists and other radicals were banned from leadership in the labor movement.

But the historical memory of the Depression Era sit-downs was not totally extinguished. It was revived again when 4 college students sat down in a white-only Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960 and began the sit-in movement that eventually toppled segregation. The radical democracy of the civil rights movement expanded the notion of public space into what had once been the sacred ground controlled by a racist private ownership. The sit-in movement spread further into US college campuses and became a standard feature of student protests against racism, gender discrimination and war.

 Today’s dysfunctional economy is producing a new generation of economic radicals, the Occupy Wall Street Movement, who challenge the Wall Street oligarchy with its own 21st century version of radical democracy.The Occupiers see themselves as part of a global democratic movement, now easier to organize with modern Internet technology. They want decent jobs and educational for all. They are also in a race against time as the planet is plundered of its resources, feeding endless local wars that really amount to another World War. They know that climate change is here, that extinction of species is the rule not the exception and that Nature always bats last. 

The Occupy Movement has the audacity to suggest that Wall Street be open not only to public scrutiny, but to some degree of public control. In a world where extreme opulence contrasts with painful economic adversity, this looks like simple common sense to most Americans, even to those with little sympathy for radical economic theories (sound familiar?).

 But this will mean challenging what Wall Street now considers the private spaces of capitalism, into the very lion’s den of global corporations. Judging by how Wall Street and its allies have violently attacked the Occupy Movement for its protests in what are supposedly public spaces, this will be the Occupy Movement’s greatest challenge of all.

Scott Olsen: Iraq Veterans Against the War- Seriously injured by the Oakland CA Police

“What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.”–Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor- 1915 

Samuel Gompers wrote those words 1915, because he knew the labor movement was a civilizing force in the USA. The Occupy Movement is also at its heart a labor movement, different than the one Samuel Gompers knew, but with a similar civilizing function. It’s working class people demanding to be treated with dignity and respect. 

Occupy Chicago 10-7 

The greed and brutality of our present economic system has become intolerable to many Americans as it undermines living standards and our democracy itself. The lives of our young people have become filled with uncertainty and dread. Young people feel left out of our political system and yearn for a voice. 

The Occupy Movement strives to be ultra democratic and give voice to those who have been excluded. That’s why Mic Check is so very powerful. It literally gives a voice to people while encouraging them listen to what is being said.  It’s also a very slow way to run a meeting which is a downside.  But the Occupy Movement is new and it is trying to give a voice to the voiceless, those who don’t have the luxury of owning a powerful TV network or expensive lobbyists. It is trying to open a national discussion about the economic and social crisis in this country.   

So people pitch tents in public parks, march on banks and other institutions, sit-down in the street, and submit to mass arrests as happened here in Chicago. My court date is tomorrow. Many of us are asking that  our arrests be quashed on the First Amendment grounds of peaceable assembly and free speech. Chicago has had nearly 350 arrests so far… 

Jane Addams Senior Caucus & Occupy Chicago 07-11

You may have noticed the grinning Guy Fawkes masks on some Occupy activists. It’s from a film about an anarchist revolution against a future fascist government called “V for Vendetta”. The main character wears the mask. It’s a favorite among some of the Occupy Movement supporters.  In it the main character speaks about the importance of of words and speaking   out when he makes a pirate broadcast to a nation that is living under fascist rule: 

There are of course those who do not want us to speak. I suspect even now, orders are being shouted into telephones, and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? 

Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, think, and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillence coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well, certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you…

This film was fantasy, but the country that V. describes sounds an awful like the USA in the wake of September 11th 2001 when we as a nation fell under the sway of fear and blundered into war and cruel attacks on our immigrant population. 

There was an awakening in 2008 around the Barack Obama campaign, but many of the young people who poured their hearts into it have been disappointed in the results. There is a lot of youthful energy that drives the Occupy Movement and a lot of distrust of leaders, authority and hierarchy. I think disappointment with the Obama presidency is part of the reason for that. 

The economic and social crisis which the Occupy Movement confronts is global and Occupy is now a global movement. There were Occupy events in  951 cities in 82 countries in October. Chicago itself is a global center of finance capital and international trade. What does this global city actually look like? 

When I walk along State Street in the Chicago Loop, I see the gravely wounded from America’s class war lining the sidewalks. They beg for chump change, styrofoam cups in hand, hoping to find a place to lay their heads at night without getting them bashed in by some knucklehead. Civilized society would never tolerate this kind of neglect. 

If I cross the bridge over the Chicago River on Michigan Ave and walk north by the glittering consumer palaces of the Miracle Mile, I can see the gorgeous outfits that just scream power and money. Much of the labor that goes into them comes from 3rd World sweatshops where working conditions would gag a maggot. These objects of splendor may scream money and power, but they can’t even whisper the word civilization. Sweatshops would not exist in a civilized world. Period. 

I would love to live in a civilized country in a civilized world. Really. But truth be told, we’re not there yet. Not even close. Some of us may live in places that have the trappings of civilization: modern plumbing, government, electricity, heating and cooling, houses, rapid transit, taxes, libraries, schools and the like. But don’t be fooled. A democratic global civilization is more than just some of us having modern conveniences  or visiting an art gallery. It’s about all of us having access to such things. 

Folks, it’s time to raise the bar on what the word civilized really means. If you want to live in a civilized society, it takes a labor movement. 

Today we have the Occupy Movement. It is committed to non-violent change and so far has stayed pretty close to that ideal. At its heart it’s a working class uprising that is rejuvenating the traditional labor movement as it forges a path of its own. America’s unions were quick to recognize that a new labor movement was rising up and have joined with it. It has been officially endorsed by AFL-CIO president Rick Trumka. Union members have participated in Occupy demonstrations in large numbers. 

Occupy Wall Street and its many off-shoots are the latest in the historic  labor revolts that have been necessary steps toward building a genuinely civilized USA. Hopefully Occupy will take us a closer to that goal because  certainly is  in a fine American tradition. 

Take the American Revolution for example. Reading and sharing Tom Paine’s popular revolutionary pamphlets in taverns and public squares, the early working class dove into advanced political philosophy, discovering that low and behold, they were smart enough to govern themselves. Goodbye to kings and queens, lords and ladies and the whole sorry lot. Brains and ability don’t necessarily travel down the inbred bloodlines of people weighed down by powdered wigs. A genuine civilization demanded much more than that. 

The first labor unions demanded more than than just better wages and working conditions. They demanded public schools and free public libraries. How could anyone have a decent family life and enjoy cultural or intellectual activities without time and education? 

The abolitionist movement was a labor movement. Slavery was the worst form of labor abuse in American history. When Jubilee came and slavery was finally abolished what was one of the first things free slaves demanded? Teachers. Teachers and books. The more the better. Freed slaves wanted to do their part in bringing democratic civilization to a nation that so desperately needed it. 

The workplace sit-downs and strikes of the Great Depression paved the way for the GI Bill which gave working class veterans a chance to obtain a college education and a modest home: those things which today which seem like an impossible dream to so many of us. 

The abolition of child labor, the women’s equality movement, the Native American movement to reclaim their lands and the civil rights movement all further extended and deepened the ideals of civilization. 

What chance did a young child working in a damp dark coal mine or a dusty dangerous textile mill have to enjoy the pleasure of reading or the joy of creating art or music? 

How many women were worn down with toil or trapped in loveless even brutal marriages, imprisoned by custom or law and unable to let their imaginations wander free? 

How many Native American young people have been lost to unemployment, poverty and to the constant insults to their traditions, traditions that offer the wisdom of thousands of years of experience on this continent? 

When Dr. King gave his famous “I have a Dream” speech, it was at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom initiated by A. Philip Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, president of the Negro American Labor Council, and vice president of the AFL-CIO. 

The civil rights movement was also a labor movement, a movement to open up economic opportunities on an equal basis, to end the terrible racial divisions that were tearing America’s working class apart and to unshackle minds from the mental chains left behind by racism and oppression. 

A labor movement is about much more than just wages, jobs, hours and work rules. 

A labor movement is  freeing working class minds so that people may achieve their authentic human potential. It’s like what Karl Marx said, “The traditions of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.” 

Just look around at our evolution deniers, our climate change deniers, our racism deniers, our gender equality deniers, our poverty deniers, our labor haters, our war makers and our surreal TV reality shows? Ask yourself, “Why are so many minds chained to such folly?” 

And who exactly benefits from this willful and militant ignorance? Good thing I’m not a conspiracy theorist or else I’d start thinking this was deliberate—– an attempt by the 1% to keep us just trained enough to turn a profit for some soulless global corporation, but not smart enough to ask why. 

Why does our society put so many obstacles in front of people trying to educate themselves? We know that poverty is the single biggest obstacle to education. So why does our society make its poverty even worse? Why does our society demand a new indentured servitude of student debt for our college students? Is society trying limit the talent pool of smart creative people to the affluent and well born? Didn’t we have an American Revolutionto deep-six that kind of so-called “thinking?” 

How fast the Occupy Movement  spread surprised not only the banksters on Wall Street but to the small group of anarchists who started the whole thing. 

The Occupy Movement now draws support from a very wide range of people. From the  plumbers who keep our toilets flushing to the art students who passionately want to reshape our culture as media workers. 

If you are serious about civilization you know that plumbers, farmworkers, factory workers, janitors, bus drivers, office workers, nurses, teachers and bridge inspectors are vital to that. So why is their work being so devalued. Their wages cut, their healthcare costs skyrocketing, and their homes foreclosed while being subjected to indignities both great and small while they attempt to carry out their duties? 

If you’re serious about civilization you must know that literature requires writers. Music requires musicians. Theater and dance requires actors and dancers. The visual arts require visual artists. Has anyone else noticed how our arts and music programs are being cut in schools across the country? If people can no longer get the education, the  time or the monetary support to create art,than the arts will wither. 

Scientists and engineers need an education not just in their specialized fields, but in the ethics and morality of how their work is used. The more that a university education becomes an impossible obstacle course or a distant dream, than science and engineering suffers. The more universities are starved for funds, than the more science and engineering shrivels. 

Is this any way to build a genuine democratic civilization. Not just a mockery of one? 

So enduring bad weather, bad media coverage, mass arrests, rubber bullets and tear gas, The Occupy Movement seeks to fix our broken economy through national discussion and national civil disobedience such as this nation has not seen in generations—and at such a speed, thanks to the Internet. This is a labor movement carrying out its civilizing mission in our best traditions. By going global Occupy Wall Street is now part of a global labor resistance movement, necessary in today’s faster-than-light-speed globalized economy. 

When the New York Police Department penned in 3 peaceful young women demonstrators on a public sidewalk and maced them so that they were screaming in pain, it went out over YouTube and was seen all over the world.  Videos of hundreds of people being arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge, including many who thought that police had directed them to that route, also went out on YouTube. Both of these events help to grow the movement, not stop it.When a young Iraq war veteran was shot in the face with a rubber bullet by the Oakland police department, the videos of this outrage generated the closest thing to a citywide-general strike since 1946. 

The coverage by the corporate media also changed as the movement grew.  Occupy could no longer be ignored and some of the corporate owned media even began to give it reasonably fair minded coverage. I saw a recent article in Bloomberg Business Week that was not a hatchet job, but a sober well written reporting job that took Occupy seriously. Of course FoxNews and the Murdoch Empire went totally ballistic, which only proves my point. 

It would be a mistake to think that the Occupy Movement can be reduced down to a set of bullet points or “demands” that its enemies can chew over. It is an exploration of possibilities and the creation of the new. The new will always have rough edges and mistakes, both large and small. Any scientist will tell you that most experiments fail, but that those failures help illuminate the road to eventual success. 

It is also a movement propelled by the young: noisy, boisterous, exuberant and exceedingly rude at times. The young apprentices who gathered in the streets of Boston and Philadelphia before the American Revolution would recognize them immediately . So would a young Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman. The young Susan B. Anthony or Alice Paul would too, as would the young radical sit-down strikers of the 1930’s labor uprising…and so on and so forth. 

But this the 21st century with a whole new set of challenges.  The Occupy Movement uses consensus rather than majority rule. This can be a beautiful process, but it is slow and frustrating. It favors those who come to their General Assemblies and participate in all kinds of weather. Many of us have pressing work, academic and family responsibilities, so this tends to exclude those people. 

The Occupy Movement is very suspicious of establishing clear public leadership. This has advantages, at least in the beginning and the Occupy Movement is very young. Less than 3 months old depending on when you think it started. Leaders can be bought, knocked off or burnt out. There is leadership in Occupy but it tends to change a lot and is often behind the scenes where manipulation and cliques can dominate. But sooner or later a movement must spawn organization and an accountable public leadership or it will die out, at least in  my opinion. Youthful enthusiasm can only take you so far. So people are asking, where do we go from here? 

There are encampments in smaller cities and towns where the relationship between the Occupiers and the local government is holding up pretty well. But in the larger cities where there is serious corporate power like Chicago, Boston, New York and the SF Bay area, there have been mass arrests and sometimes police violence. A lot of energy has been poured into defense, making it more difficult to focus on the economic and social issues that caused people to come together in the first place. I was at a meeting last Sunday of the Occupy Chicago defense committee and this issue was raised and discussed.

Occupy Chicago 10-23

 There have been problems within the camps as they are open to all, and there are a lot of people out there in our American cities who are very damaged and simply can’t function well in a tense closely packed environment. How do the tent cities hold this movement together & deal with these people? There have been incidents  in camps,including sexual assault, that made women no longer feel safe and this needs to be addressed. How will the local Occupy Movements survive over the winter and beyond? What about cities like Chicago, which after over 300 arrests has no encampment?  Occupy Chicago is as homeless as some of its activists. How do we deal with that? 

I believe that the strength of the Occupy Movement lies in its political independence. From here on I will judge all political parties whether its the Democratic party, the Green Party or any of the small communist and socialist parties  by how well they respect that. Yes, be our allies but respect the non-partisan nature of this broad and still evolving movement. That goes for the leadership of the AFL-CIO unions as well. Be allies. Offer advice and material support, but don’t try to take it over, because you’ll kill it. 

The Occupy movement is still overwhelmingly white.  Imagine if Occupy were mostly people of color and had minority white participation. Does anyone seriously think it would get the same kind of media coverage? That the police would behave in the same way? That the demands would even be the same? I wager that everything would be quite different. 

We are seeing a lot of discussion about the racial politics of Occupy especially among activists of color. There is an offshoot of Occupy called Occupy the Hood that has been doing actions within city neighborhoods, especially around foreclosures and police brutality. There was a demonstration a couple of weeks ago in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago over a foreclosure and planned eviction. 

This raises another issue of critical importance. What if this Occupy Movement does evolve into a genuine multi-racial movement with more direction and focus. In the past these kinds of interracial movements have encountered ferocious repression. 

Check out Reconstruction after the Civil War, the populist movements of the 1890’s, the civil rights movement of the the 1950’s and 1960’s or the Black Panther inspired rainbow coalition of the the 1960’s and 1970’s. Fred Hampton was assassinated not far from here when he had  success organizing a interracial revolutionary youth movement.  

Racism has been a critical aspect of American-style capitalism since the beginning. There are Occupiers who believe that the reason the police violence in Oakland has been so savage is that more people of color are in involved in the movement there. I don’t know if that is the reason why, but it does sound plausible to me. 

The Occupy Movement is trying to be the voice of a very diverse working class which has divisions that stretch back to before there was a United States of America. 

I sometime think of the Occupy Movement as a fire bell in the night.  

It’s a warning of how bad things are now and how much worse they can get if Occupy is  unsuccessful. So I have a very specific  warning to Wall Street. You may not like the annoying disruptive non-violent demonstrations of Occupy, but you know, if you don’t listen to them, the kind of protest that could come after them you’ll like even less. Americans are not a patient people and not everyone has Gandhi in their hearts. 

The Occupy Movement knows from its brief existence that the road they have chosen is not an easy one. 

A labor organizer by the name of Eugene Debs said this in the early 20th century: 

“Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and bruised itself. We have been enjoined by the courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, traduced by the press, frowned upon in public opinion, and deceived by politicians. But notwithstanding all this and all these, labor is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun.”

We are the 99%. Keep on keepin’ on!