Is Bush Creating The Perfect Storm? (YOUR COMMENTS, PLEASE!)

[Radio_Lady]

A few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of interviewing Stephen Fleischman, whose career as a television writer-director-producer spans more than three decades. Starting in 1953, Steve spent twenty years with ABC News and ten years with CBS News. In 1959, he participated in the formation of the renowned Murrow-Friendly "CBS Reports" series. In 2004, he wrote his memoir about his thirty years in Network News. The book is entitled "A Red in the House," and you can read more about Steve at his web site: http://www.aredinthehouse.com.

This month, I received a link to one of Steve Fleischman's recent articles, "Is Bush Creating The Perfect Storm?" The full text is posted at WBAI Radio, a New York web site.
http://www.wbai.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=8395&Itemid=2

I'd like to get your reactions to this interesting and important article. I'll read the best of your comments on my upcoming program devoted to politics. The show will be broadcast on the Internet on Monday, March 6, 2006, and locally through Channel 10's audio service in Portland, OR.

Send me a private message or post your responses in this thread. Thanks in advance for your help. Radio_Lady in Oregon

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Excerpts are below:

"Is Bush Creating The Perfect Storm?"

With outsourcing and downsizing and factory closings, and digital communications made easy and cheap, both blue-collar and white-collar jobs started flying off to that nirvana of capital, the enticing venue of the rock bottom wage, making that giant sucking sound that Ross Perot once spoke of. The industrial core of this country is being hollowed out.

Right now, we’re having another great drive of “corporatism” in the United States. President Eisenhower tried to warn us about it before he left office by calling it “the Military Industrial complex”. Benito Mussolini, the former dictator of Italy defined it in another way. He called “Corporatism” the interlocking of government and corporate power -- otherwise known as Fascism.

(snipped)

We have a new set of circumstances today. And we need a new strategy and tactics to deal with it. We have a growing pool, more of a roaring river of unskilled, mostly foreign born working class and underclass residents in this country, some citizens, some not. We have college graduates with no place to go. The formerly good jobs are now overseas. We have evaporating purchasing power as those good jobs disappear. With rising technology, the productivity of labor skyrockets, but the ability to buy the products we make or import plummets.

Bush says our economy is sound. Yes,(but) for whom? Not for the working class, the under-employed or the unemployed. Bush wants to institutionalize his tax cuts for the rich, has come up with a new military budget of more than 400 billion and, at the same time, wants to cut social spending. Would you call that rational?

We’re burdened with more than a military-industrial complex. We have a militarized nation. Still, the day is not far off when we’ll be forced out of Iraq as we were out of Vietnam. Our economy, despite Bush’s assurances, is being guided by a quivering invisible hand.

Bush is setting us up for the perfect storm.

It might do us some good to look back (at) some lessons of history.

The first great drive of corporatism hit the nation during the “Robber Baron” period, the late 19th and early 20th Century. So-called “captains of industry”, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Gould, Vanderbilt, to name a few, started carving up the country, stealing what they could from the government, the land and the laboring classes.

There were also some sung and unsung heroes of the day (who) appeared on the scene during that period intent on protecting those laboring classes from the depredations of capitalist exploitation. They were engaged in what is called union organizing.

(snipped)

Although trade unions and guilds of various kinds existed before the Civil War, with the end of slavery, wage labor more appropriately met the needs of industry. The union movement became more militant. The internal conflicts in the labor movement were fought over policy, bitter and uncompromising. Sam Gompers certainly was one of the protagonists. His antagonist and nemesis was Eugene V. Debs. The sticking point -- should the labor movement restrict itself to economic issues, wages and working conditions -- or extend its influence into politics, Socialist and otherwise?

Horace Greeley, who founded the New York Tribune in 1841, was very interested in Socialist ideas and published articles by Karl Marx in his newspaper. Over the years, many of these ideas—Marx’s incisive analysis of Capitalism—seeped into the heads of some union leaders. A Socialist America was not unthinkable to many in those days.

(snipped)

Joe Hill, a songwriter, itinerant laborer and union organizer, led the dockworkers’ strike in San Pedro where he was arrested on trumped up charges and found guilty of a murder he didn’t commit. His fellow workers and comrades organized a major campaign to exonerate Hill but all efforts failed. Before his execution by firing squad on November 19, 1915, Joe Hill wrote to Big Bill Haywood:

"Good-bye Bill. I die like a true rebel. Don't waste any time mourning, organize!”

(snipped)

In 1925, writer Alfred Hayes wrote a poem about Joe Hill that was put to music by Earl Robinson in 1936; thus, later generations were inspired by Joe’s story. This is the first verse:

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
Alive as you and me.
Says I "But Joe, you're ten years dead"
"I never died" said he,
"I never died" said he.

So -— what have we learned from all this that can help stop Bush and his administration from riding the ship of state into the perfect storm? Well, let’s listen to what Joe Hill said before he died:

“Don’t mourn for me, organize!”

Sounds good, doesn’t it? But (now) those old fashioned ideas seem romantic and quaint. They won’t work today. With union membership down to 13%, we can’t count on organized labor for much leadership, hard as they try.

Where are the (motivated organizers) of today, now that we really need them?

By Stephen Fleischman (Edited for brevity by Radio_Lady)
For additional information, go to: www.ARedintheHouse.com.

More at link:

http://www.wbai.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=8395&Itemid=2