Taking back the USA
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor

Mar 27, 2009, 00:26

I have a vision, as Martin Luther King once said. A vision of racial
and economic equality, equal opportunity and civil rights for people
of all colors. The question is how do I, we, go about realizing this
vision?
Dr. King conceived of passive resistance, non-violent protests, to
bring vast numbers of people, black and white into the street, to the
schools and lunch counters, the bus stops and the Washington Mall to
show their strength and insistence on their principles. I envision a
similar formula.
But let me make clear what I am protesting. First and foremost, it is
globalization, which is destroying labor, its unions, and consequently
the working and middle classes of the United States. In this process,
it has dismantled the manufacturing infrastructure and reduced us at
best to a service economy. Millions of jobs, blue and white collar, we
know have been `outsourced,’ given away to the lowest bidders along
with the hard-won benefits of US workers, including healthcare,
pensions and decent working conditions.
Globalization has profited only the multi-national corporations and
the rich elite who run or invest in them. The multi-national
corporation sits on the backs of working people around the world,
people who have been pitted against each other, and now work for less
because they undersold their services to enrich those
corporations. These corporations financially divided and conquered
world economies.
Yet the labor movement of this country, as Mike Davis pointed out
recently on Bill Moyers Journal, was the leading progressive movement
until Reagan began actively union busting. Labor was also followed by
the antiwar movements, in which labor often took part, and preceded by
the civil rights movement in the 50s, which also joined in antiwar
demonstrations.
We can look back through the 19th century to labor as a force that
organized Americans of all ethnic and racial backgrounds for the
common good, advancing wages
tions, and providing an agenda politicians could follow, if they
wanted labor and minority votes — and if they didn’t want more people
in the street.
Labor made the Industrial Revolution a reality and also the unions, as
well as decent wages, healthcare and pension plans. Since labor has
been disenfranchised, since the multi-national corporation goes at
will to the lowest bidder, whether in Timbuktu, the Philippines,
China, or Vietnam, the working citizens of the United States have gone
to hell in a handbasket. The decline of our industrial infrastructure
has made us dependent on imports as well, creating a huge imbalance in
trade, and turning the financial sector (now fully deregulated) into
creating financial products of mass destruction.
AIG Financial Products (located in London) was no accident, but the
culmination of a multi-national corporation with a hedge fund pasted
onto it, joining in the collateralization of toxic paper, including
its infamous credit default swaps and hell’s whole handbasket of
poisonous financial products. In retreating to lower wages for lower
level employees, these poisons were used so that management could get
bigger and bigger salaries and bonuses. We destroyed our manufacturing
infrastructure, once the most powerful in the world, for this
socio-economic drek.
As a result, we have destroyed the balance of power between labor and
management, and left labor to the most predatory to rule, i.e.,
Wal-Mart, AIG, Citigroup, etc.
Yet, many of the same corporations, like General Motors, have managed
to stay afloat in China on the back of slave labor, offering no
healthcare or pensions, but just the coolie wage. So, where is the
protest in the US, the unions, the irate workers, the civil rights
allies, the army of protestors who shouted for the New Deal and
Roosevelt in Washington, D.C., and around these United States? Well,
they are on unemployment lines, disoriented and hoping for a chance to
survive or serve the outrageous Wal-Mart’s of this `everyday low
price’ employment.
To, Americans in their consumerist march for the biggest and best
`bargains’ brought it on themselves, buying these foreign produced
labels like pigs in a trough, greedily, without considering their
poisonous effects on their own economy. But, they were encouraged at
every turn to abandon their own by the marketing complex. Is this
protectionism? Not really. Patriotism of a sort is more like it. China
is cash-rich and questioning our dollar’s value in this terrible
downturn while our president is borrowing trillions to keep the
economy afloat. To his credit, he has plans to rebuild physical
infrastructure and schools. I hope they work.
Hopefully, we won’t be importing Asian slaves like multibillionaire
and Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, known
affectionately as `Prince Mo’ to the Rhode Island-size Emirate of
Dubai, as author Mike Davis calls it, `the new global icon of
imagineered urbanism’ in his article Sinister Paradise. For with this
oil-glut-financing, along with voiceless labor comes a sinister
sex-trade, kidnapping, slavery and sadistic violence, `the Bangkok of
the Middle East . . . populated with thousands of Russian, Armenian,
Indian, and Iranian prostitutes controlled by various transnational
gangs and mafias . . . also a world center for money laundering . . .’
Once you get started on this reversal of civilization, taking more and
more of the wages from working and middle classes to feed the
gluttonous few, instead of spreading the wealth and the democracy that
comes with it, you end up at the bottom of the human barrel, which
includes `Dubai’s most scandalized vice: child slavery,’ which
includes kidnapping young children, pressing them into slavery,
starvation, beatings and rapes. In Dubai’s case, it’s to make these
innocents camel jockeys for Prince Mo and Company’s arcane
entertainment. Want to visit and take a look at the future? Mike Davis
did. Read all about it.
But then, Mike is a confessed socialist who teaches at the University
of California
king class college, where his students are finding it harder and
harder to stay in school, given the money and job shortage for their
families and themselves. Mike doesn’t think of us as a socialist
nation because we’re bailing out banks, even inviting private equity
to invest in `stress testing’ those banks to either make them into
stronger, more solvent entities or ready to face euthanasia.
If indeed the government permanently managed the banks that would
smack of socialism. Also, if the means of production were acquired and
run by the government permanently that would be a classical definition
of socialism. But this isn’t the case here, not by a long shot. In
fact, the banks at some point may need to be run by the country for
some period if the Geithner plan doesn’t work. And there should be no
need to break the world’s land speed record for coming up with a
solution simply by spending money. How you spend it, what you spend it
on, is what makes the difference. Hear that Tim, Larry, Obama?
What I’m pointing to is the need for a progressive movement of labor
to fight multi-national greed and spread, like the civil rights
movement fought racism. This movement is built on the people speaking
out, protesting in the streets, at selling outlets, at the seat of
government, so that the Congress hears the agenda: take back the
United States of America — from the multi-national corporations, from
stock market deregulation, from bank deregulation, from the further
issuance of financial products that belong in a Vegas casino, from the
constant offshoring of the means of production at the price of its
decay.
Remember, the American people stepped from the last days of 1930s
`depression in a depression’ to 1941 and Pearl Harbor to mobilize the
most powerful industrial machine on earth, which protected us against
the incursions of Hitler and fascism. When we put our collective
shoulders to the wheel, when labor has rights, has dignity, is not the
slavish servant of Citigroup-type greedos who recently buil
t money, then we’re a-okay, more than okay, a great and powerful
nation.
Fortunately, today we live in the information revolution of the
Internet. More people have more sophisticated political and economic
information than ever in human history. What we need is the informed
and binding force of labor’s activism, combined with students and
civil rights movements, working together to make a better life for
themselves, their children, their grandkids, and the future of this
country.
This, as I’ve said, relies on turning away from this fiendish notion
of globalization. Who the hell wants a one-world government,
especially if it’s Prince Mo? Do you? The government I want is the one
my fellow Americans elect with me to take care of and heal Americans
first, and not to put them on a hegemonic march to rule the
world. That is perverse, stunted, reactionary right-wing fascism at
its worst. Parenthetically, I’m not going to walk away from that vote
because its process is often abused.
Obama’s purpose should be to rebuild a labor-strong, manufacturing
economy in the United States, not leaving our workers like the serfs
of some overfed sheik, or some fattened CEO thief, or some crazed
military dictator ala Hitler, Mussolini, Pinochet, or Bush and Cheney
— the latter now being accused of having headed an executive
assassination ring to exterminate at his bidding foreign leaders not
to his liking. This is not the USA I was born into in 1938, not the
USA I grew up in, in the 40s, 50s or 60s. It all turned downward from
Nixon on, right into this toilet economy we now find ourselves flushed
into, most probably by the financiers.
So, let American industry flourish again, let labor lead again, let
the students follow, let the ex-veterans follow, let the civil rights
movements join in, all the people who’ve had the burden of fighting
all our wars. Let those who bear and have borne those burdens tell
those puffs in Congress (and especially those `Blue Dog’ `provided
for’ Conservative Democrats) not to try to sc
uld try to scuttle this country by selling out labor, the aged and
minorities, and give trillions in tax cuts to the rich, trillions to
two hopeless wars, then we can spend and borrow responsibly to rebuild
this country. That’s how to take back the United States of America, by
healing your sick society first of all.
And we can do it by using the US’s imagination for industry to create
a green economy, to improve on the present one, as well, by exporting
our genius, our inventions to the world, and with a generosity of
spirit that once was unparalleled. And, lest I forget, we can take
Israel off our shoulders and the $30-billion, 10-year plan to continue
their Middle East genocide. We’ve been there once or twice in our own
history and it didn’t work out well. There’s no need to try it a third
time and end up betrayed, as we often have been, by our perennially
spying `ally.’
This is a thumbnail sketch of my vision to take the USA back. It takes
people with the most at stake, workers, students, veterans, minorities
and activists of all ages, and not Washington lobbyists fed by
multi-national corporations. We can do it. We will do it. Or suffer
the consequences of economic enslavement, one that will make the Great
Depression of yesterday pale by comparison.Jerry Mazza is a freelance
writer living in New York City. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net. His
new book, `State Of Shock: Poems from 9/11 on’ is available at
, Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com.