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The New C-word, or an open letter to the working people of the USA
September 15th, 2006
The True C-Word
The actual “C word” which cannot be uttered on the radio, on the television, or appear in print has five, not four letters. It is, of course, class. We hem and haw at the concept of the United States even having classes, much less dare attempt to make political appeals to any save a tremendous mythic “middle class.” By contemporary standards, everyone who can make carfare to get to work and not sleep in the street is “middle class,” save a few “rich” and the “poor.” For some odd reason people who work for others see themselves as “middle class.” That is for two reasons: the first is based on our rejection of the titled Europeans as our “betters,” and the other is the fact that economically, most working people were once at a standard of living that rivalled the European middle class and the people were truly mobile, that is, a man who worked hard as a laborer could, indeed, see his children become middle management and his grandchildren become professionals. That day is over. There might still linger a Duke of Devonshire in England, but there is just as surely a Marquis of Microsoft, not merely in the United States, but with title good throughout the world: Forbes magazine is the new Almanach de Gotha.
And as for the “American Dream,” based on the proposition that hard work resulted in decent benefits as well as good pay, and thus upward mobility (if not for the workers, then at least for their children), it seems that we, the American worker, whether at the counting house or on the assembly line, are rapidly becoming “expendable.” The economy is booming! The numbers do not lie. Unfortunately, it is booming based on the sale of electronic trinkets sold here but made in Asia and clothing made of cotton grown here but spun into thread, woven into cloth and cut and sewn in Asian sweatshops instead of here. Our cars from Detroit are now compressed and placed onto cargo ships where the steel is melted down and turned into Asian models.
The vast majority of people in the United States and Canada are paid wages for work performed or else are pensioned. We do not live off rents received from property we own or dividends on investments while producing nothing but carbon dioxide. We do not practice one of the free professions. We get paid by an individual or a company or a corportion either for our time or by our commissions: we are the working people, but seem ashamed to call ourselves what we are.
It is time for that to change.
We must become what Jefferson, Roosevelt, Truman and Jackson, great Democrats, dreampt: a nation of the common folk, capable of governing ourselves and independent from the restraints of decaying European social systems. We however have reached an industrial base which Jackson and Jefferson never imagined — not that we do not still produce a tremendous amount of agricultural produce. In fact, we feed a large portion of the world. We now have new feudal masters, as surely as Pre-Revolutionary France. The new “betters” are the Lords of the Universe, the unholy alliance of big business and big capital. Our government revolves around their axes.
They have created for us a nation of unhealthy air, nonpotable water, and oil slicks befouling our shores. Mountains of garbage fill plots just beyond our cities, our public transportation remains in danger at a simple majority of elected officials’ whims and continued sufferance, and in many places is either entirely lacking or else nothing more than a vanity vestige of its former glory. The major population centers, of course, are excepted in the area of public transport, the workers simply being utterly dependent upon the trains and buses that enable them to get to and from work. The rest of us outside of Boston, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Los Angeles and a few other places are at the mercy of the automobile. Even rudimentary concessions such as bicycle lanes are missing from our public thoroughfares. We have abandoned our cities for auto-dependent suburbs and exurbs, increasing our pollution and dependence on foreign oil while ignoring all alternative fuels. The globe is warming, the ice caps of the Artic and shelves of the Antartic are melting while glaciers receed in South America, Greenland and Europe. Do we wish half of Florida to be under water in one hundred years or for grain and trees to flourish in Iceland?
This is a global problem, and it is rooted in the mismanagement of the stewartship given us by Nature’s bounty to the people. Yet it is not the people, per se, who have mismanaged the lands and airs and waters. Our individual contributions are small, yet it is our system of large corporations shaping our daily lives that bear the brunt of the fault. It is not a man or a woman or even a family who decided to denude the mountainsides of Appalachia for coal. It is not a single person who decided that a single hull was sufficient to contain a tanker full of crude oil from grounding, but a corporation. It is corporations that have fought tooth and nail in a primal brutish fashion all attempts at making public and universal our most basic necessities: health care and energy production.
Finally, it is corporations who furnish the 24 hours of daily fear and hate that blanket our airwaves. The Republican corporate party appear to answer only to corporations, because that is wherein their campaign funds lie. The tell us that dissent is “treason.” To question the morality of the Iraq war is not to “support the troops” when they send our boys into battle underarmored and bereft of armor; and when we raise the reasoning of American youth ambushed in a war that was based on falsehood in a country in civil war, they tell us “stay the course.” These are the people who blanket our airwaves: shills and pawns of megacorporations. We ask for peace and they give us war. We ask for health care benefits and a decent pension and a just wage and they tell us with rhetoric and sermon that we are ingrates, deserving only what bones are tossed to us and that we are lucky to even have jobs, as we are easily replaced to another continent. The Republican government provides us no relief from “free trade” or “outsourcing” or “drowning the Federal government in a bathtub” — what we get is tax relief for the wealthy and our sons and brothers making a choice between the enlistment lines or unemployment lines and money disappearing faster than it can be printed: record defecits and trade inbalance. The present Republican corporate administration tells us that “unemployment is down” but neglects to mention that one disappears from the unemployment list after six months time and that many of the “new jobs” are nowhere near the benefit and pay level that the newly reemployed once had. The government neglects to inform us of the hardship in Mexico that NAFTA has caused, with native agriculture falling to record low levels as people flock from their self-sufficient farms with corn surplus to the colonias, that delicate word that replaces “open cesspool, no benefits, foul aired urban proletariat border zone to where US manufacturing jobs have disappeared.” Pity the poor Mexicans who have become urban peons, with no insurance, no environmental enforcement, and only more hours of labor the next day for a few pesos as solace. Is this what we wish the United States to become?
There is an alternative: a party that preaches peace and prosperity; real security and not slogans; jobs at a living wage with guaranteed health care for all; freedom for one to worship as one wishes or not at all; a return to the heritage of Jackson and Jefferson, that is to say, to the people. That is the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, the The Progressive Democrats of America the PDA, the wing of the Democratic Party that champions American workers, the party of Representatives Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers. They believe that government should be as Lincoln described: for, of and by the people. Corporations are not people. Do you people who work and produce want a share of political power, to have your voice unmuffled? If you want peace and not constant threat of war, an American economy centered on American workers and not abstract “corporate bottom lines,” if you want a safe home and a secure United States, then you have a choice: vote Democratic and Progressive Democratic whenever you have the chance. Be proud of what you are: working men and women, the most noble calling in all of Creation, the first jobs: Adam who delved and Eve who span!
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