Nowhere To Turn?

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

“I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.”

— Mary Harris Jones

From the title of this piece you might think we are going to talk about the massive nightmare of housing foreclosure, seemingly unstoppable and so tangled by incestuous financing that there seems no viable answer for this national emergency. Or perhaps you think we’re going to explore the conservatives’ war on women’s rights, attacking from every direction at once and leaving women more vulnerable than they’ve been in a generation or more. From abortion to contraception, from family planning to proposed laws favoring the life of the fetus over the life of the mother, a woman’s right to make informed decisions about her own bodily functions is in jeopardy from coast to coast.

Maybe you think, reading the title, that we are going to address Obama’s budget, something of a self-inflicted wound with its horrific cuts to public services and discretionary spending, while Republicans exercise their new power of the purse to demand even more draconian cuts to existing programs. Common folks will now be punished for the greed and avarice of the rich, who are too well-heeled to be required to take responsibility for their actions.

When you read that there’s nowhere to turn, any of these issues might come to mind, because each is an emergency that is beyond our control and immune to our influence. Earlier attempts to reign in disinformation and political cover for these issues failed, and now the country has become radicalized – but not in a good way. We used to be reasonable people. It wasn’t all that long ago that we appeared to be functional, able to hold a discussion without waving a gun, able to engage in rational dialog, to establish policy and carry it out. It wasn’t all that long ago that we took pride in our diversity, in our political system and our ability to protect civil liberties for our melting pot of a republic. Not that long ago America was admired for her attributes, not reviled for her attitudes.

The watching world forgave us a first term of George Bush but not a second; and now, with infantile Republicans defunding the Democratic agenda, who knows what bits of our reputation we’ll be able to salvage. Democracy seems to be catching fire in the Mid-east, but the embers need fanning here at home. Rising out of turmoil in Tunisia and imported to Egypt, protests and marches demanding an even break for the little guy have become epidemic in places like Bahrain, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, Wisconsin.

Wait! What was that last? Our Wisconsin, with its newly-defined Republican congress and it’s newly-elected Republican Governor, Scott Walker? Well, who’d a thunk it? Fledgling-Gov. Walker proposed radical cuts to benefits — and ultimately, pay — for state workers, and the elimination of all collective bargaining rights, then threatened to call out the National Guard to contain the resulting uproar. The protests begun mid-week have grown far larger and lasted far longer than expected. After Democratic leaders fled the Wisconsin capital this week rather than be forced into a quorum for a vote on the Governor’s proposal, state police were sent after them, but they had found refuge over the state line in Indiana.

The capital building in Madison, Wisconsin, turns out to be Ground Zero in American workers’ reawakening of their own political power and self-determination. Over 30,000 teachers and their students, nurses, firefighters and other public workers have been flooding the area for several days now. This is probably not surprising to Wisconsin-o-philes, who know that the state still enjoys a proud union presence. It probably does come as a surprise to Republicans nation-wide, who erroneously believe they have a mandate to activate every bat-shit-crazy notion they’ve been nursing for decades in their “eliminate government entirely” fantasies.

This particular fantasy — breaking the last union strongholds once and for all — is the project of a Libertarian multi-billionaire you’ve no doubt heard of, a Mr. David Koch. Wisconsin is host to over a dozen Koch Industry facilities. The new governor has enjoyed Mr. Koch’s political contributions, as have the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, Wisconsin’s Reince Priebus, and Paul Ryan, the GOP “young gun” selected to give the Pub State of the Union address following Obama’s this year. All of them are familiar with Mr. Koch’s Astroturf group, Americans For Prosperity.

Koch’s well-funded fantasy is to convince the public that not only is government ineffectual, interfering where it doesn’t belong, but that all public workers are extravagantly-paid exploiters of the Nanny State who have nursed off the national tit too long,. The GOP backs this union-busting narrative completely. Rush Limbaugh quickly chimed in to call protesting teachers “anti-democracy parasites.” Glenn Beck called the protest in Madison evil, as he did the uprising in Egypt. The Koch brothers agree: evil to their profit margin.

Like most radical Republicans, Governor Walker is tone deaf to compromise. The kind of hubris required to set the military against public workers has been dormant in this nation for a good many decades, and we’d better think very carefully before we go down that road again. The last such incident happened with the Memphis sanitation strike in 1968, just prior to King’s assassination.

Today, long years of Reaganomics and policies promoted by conservative think-tanks have recreated the great class disparities  that gave rise to the unions in the early 20th century. The threat of military intervention to break strikes raises the specter of our bloody, violent past, pitting the plutocracy’s corporate interests against decent wages and working conditions for laborers. During that period, great heroes of the labor movement arose. None were so well loved as Mary Harris Jones.

Mary Harris was an Irish immigrant, her family driven by the potato famine to resettle in Canada prior to the Civil War. She became both a seamstress and a teacher, and after marriage she settled in Nashville with her husband, George Jones, a union man. When yellow fever took George as well as Mary’s four young children, she retreated to Chicago and ran a small dress shop until it fell to the great fire. Close to the turn of the century, her enthusiasm for the labor movement turned her into a first-class union organizer. Mother Jones, as she was affectionately known, advocated for miners everywhere, particularly for their families. All oppressed workers enjoyed her support and political clout. She championed the end of child labor and fought tirelessly for the underprivileged.

“I’m not a humanitarian. I’m a hell-raiser, ” Mary is quoted as saying. “I would fight God Almighty Himself if He didn’t play square with me.”

That candor and courage earned her the title of “the most dangerous woman in America.’ You can read more about Mother Jones and the labor movement here.

Mary Jones died in her 90s, after battling presidents and the mega-moneyed heads of corporations. She had seen the evil men do, close up and personal. I’d bet that Mary’s own life story sparked her endless compassion and endurance and steadied her for the battle she fought so brilliantly as the political persona, Mother Jones. Looking back, she seems to have won almost as many skirmishes as she lost, and that’s quite an achievement. She understood solidarity, she understood the power of people joining arms to march together.

“What one state could not get alone, what one miner against a powerful corporation could not achieve, can be achieved by the union,” Mother Jones would tell those reluctant to join in. And to those who lost patience she said, “Reformation, like education, is a journey, not a destination.”

It’s class warfare we’re discussing, then and now: the great battle of this generation and an end of an era. I’m encouraged that no less a personage than Noam Chomsky thinks the incident in Wisconsin could be the start of our homegrown revolution. It has already spread into Ohio. By the way, also out of Wisconsin this week comes a new political action group, Progressives United, from former Senator Russ Feingold, dedicated to reform of electorial finance and the repeal of the Citizen’s United ruling. Sign up for information here.

It’s time to let government be ‘by the people,’ rather than some version of Big Daddy or Nanny. We’ve grown up now. We can let go of the need to give our good away for safety’s sake. When we feel there’s nowhere to turn, we turn to one another as we’ve always done. We link arms, we move together.

“Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living,” Mary Jones famously exhorted. Trying to form “a perfect union” is never going to be easy, but like Mother said, it’s not a destination. It’s a journey.