By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
Representative democracy is suffering a bloodletting. Those with the love of money and power, greedy to see it die a death from the thousand cuts that began under Nixon, found purchase in the growing fundamentalist movement under Reagan and have, with a fanatic devotion to duty, delivered us into the hands of the oh-so-elite one percent. Worse, according to lefty pundit and activist, Cenk Uyger, thanks to a corruptly ideological Supreme court, that is now only 0.00024 percent. Those with extreme wealth can contribute as pleases them, and pay well for the power they purchase. Uyger repeats Thomas Jefferson’s warning, “The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.”
In the summer of 1981, Ronald Reagan made a public showing of good faith negotiations with overworked and underpaid members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), who had staged a strike. PATCO was one of a slim handful of unions that had supported Reagan’s election to the presidency, personally assured that he would be their friend and advocate well into the future. Little did they dream that only a short while later, his administration — poised on opening a vein into the circulatory system of American populism — would pull the plug on their demands. He was sorry to have to do it, he advised them, but he was invoking the Taft-Hartley Act, which supersedes the provisions of the National Labor Relations Act to enable injunctions against strikes that endanger public health and safety. In short order, Reagan fired all 11,345 air traffic controllers, replacing them with half that number of hastily-trained scabs. St. Ronnie the Reagan had busted the unions.
That was the beginning of the decline of worker protections in the USA, the eroding of bargaining power, and a watershed moment in the GOP’s heartfelt desire to destroy the labor movement and shift power back into the waiting hands of big business. In the 1950s, around 35 percent of the country belonged to a union, providing stability to the middle class and ensuring worker rights and benefits. Though the individual unions were sometimes heavy-handed and belligerent, corruptible and defiant, they wielded enormous power. Their demands alarmed the business community, who knew the union bosses held the winning hand, lest they direct their members to lay down their tools in solidarity and strike, ending manufacturing production. It was a fiscal stand-off that built the middle class.