{"id":34620,"date":"2011-02-19T06:13:11","date_gmt":"2011-02-19T11:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=34620"},"modified":"2011-09-24T16:04:07","modified_gmt":"2011-09-24T20:04:07","slug":"nowhere-to-turn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/by-judith-gayle-2\/nowhere-to-turn\/","title":{"rendered":"Nowhere To Turn?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

“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.” <\/em><\/p>\n

— Mary Harris Jones<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From the title of this piece you might think we are going to talk about the massive nightmare of housing foreclosure<\/a>, 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\u00a0explore the conservatives’ war on women’s rights<\/a>, 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\u00a0the mother, a woman’s right to make informed decisions about her own bodily functions is in jeopardy from coast to coast.<\/p>\n

\"Wisconsin<\/a>
Wisconsin: battleground against the billionaire Koch brothers<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Maybe you think, reading the title, that we are going to address Obama’s budget<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

When you read that there’s nowhere to turn,\u00a0any of these issues might come to mind, because\u00a0each is an emergency that\u00a0is beyond our control and immune to our influence. Earlier attempts to reign in disinformation and political cover for these issues\u00a0failed, and now the country has become radicalized \u2013 but not in a good way. We used to be reasonable people. It wasn’t all that long ago that we\u00a0appeared 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.\u00a0Not that long ago America was admired for\u00a0her attributes, not reviled for\u00a0her attitudes.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The watching world\u00a0forgave us a first term of George Bush but not a second; and now, with infantile Republicans defunding the Democratic\u00a0agenda, 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\u00a0need fanning\u00a0here at home.\u00a0Rising out of turmoil\u00a0in Tunisia and imported to Egypt, protests and marches demanding\u00a0an even break for the little guy\u00a0have become epidemic in places like Bahrain, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, Wisconsin.<\/p>\n

Wait!\u00a0What was that last?\u00a0Our<\/em> Wisconsin, with its newly-defined Republican congress and it’s newly-elected Republican Governor, Scott Walker? Well, who’d a thunk it?\u00a0Fledgling-Gov. Walker proposed radical cuts to\u00a0benefits — and ultimately, pay —\u00a0for state workers, and\u00a0the elimination of\u00a0all collective bargaining rights, then threatened to call out the National Guard to contain the resulting uproar. The protests begun mid-week\u00a0have 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.<\/p>\n

The capital building in Madison, Wisconsin, turns out to be Ground Zero in American workers’\u00a0reawakening of\u00a0their own political power and self-determination.\u00a0Over 30,000 teachers and their students, nurses,\u00a0firefighters 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\u00a0the state\u00a0still\u00a0enjoys a\u00a0proud 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\u00a0notion they’ve been nursing for decades in their “eliminate government entirely” fantasies.<\/p>\n

This particular fantasy — breaking the last union strongholds\u00a0once 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<\/a>, 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\u00a0this year. All of them are familiar with Mr. Koch’s\u00a0Astroturf group, Americans For Prosperity<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0narrative completely. Rush Limbaugh quickly chimed in to call protesting teachers “anti-democracy parasites.” Glenn Beck\u00a0called the protest in Madison evil, as he did the uprising in Egypt. The Koch brothers agree: evil to their profit margin.<\/p>\n

Like most radical Republicans, Governor Walker is tone deaf to compromise. The kind of hubris required to\u00a0set 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\u00a0prior to\u00a0King\u2019s assassination.<\/p>\n

Today, long years of Reaganomics and policies promoted by conservative think-tanks\u00a0have recreated the great class disparities\u00a0 that gave rise to the unions in the early 20th century. The threat of military intervention to break strikes raises\u00a0the specter of\u00a0our bloody, violent past<\/a>,\u00a0pitting\u00a0the plutocracy’s corporate interests\u00a0against 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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0as well as\u00a0Mary’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\u00a0enthusiasm for\u00a0the 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.<\/p>\n

“I’m not a humanitarian. I’m a hell-raiser, ” Mary is quoted as saying. “I\u00a0would fight God Almighty Himself if He didn’t play square with me.”<\/p>\n

That candor and courage\u00a0earned her the title of “the most dangerous woman in America.’ You can read more about Mother Jones and the labor movement here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mary Jones\u00a0died\u00a0in her\u00a090s, 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\u00a0Mary’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\u00a0seems to have won almost as many skirmishes as she lost, and that’s quite an achievement.\u00a0She understood solidarity, she understood the power of people joining arms to march together.<\/p>\n

“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\u00a0would tell those reluctant to join in. And to those who lost patience she said, “Reformation, like education, is a journey, not a destination.”<\/p>\n

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\u00a0thinks 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<\/em>,\u00a0from former Senator Russ Feingold, dedicated to reform of electorial finance and the repeal of the Citizen’s United<\/em> ruling. Sign up for information here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0We link arms, we move together.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1744],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34620"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34620\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}