[Mb-civic] bushrelativesforkerry and "McKinley or Roosevelt? This election is as much about the past as the future..."

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

I think you will appreciate this excellent article by Thom Hartmann.  First, I 
wanted to share a really cool website--check it out NOW before the election 
and share w/others!
http://www.bushrelativesforkerry.com



McKinley or Roosevelt? This election is as much 
about the past as the future...

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1025-32.htm

by Thom Hartmann

>From the Gilded Age to the Great Depression to today, the economic agenda
of conservatives has been easily summarized in two words: "cheap labor." 
Nowhere was that more clearly on display than in the recent decision by
Judge William S. Howard that "relieved" coal companies from having to pay
already-earned retirement benefits to coal miners in Kentucky, West
Virginia, Indiana, and Illinois. 

While the coal industry spends millions on feel-good TV advertisements
featuring an eagle impressed by how they're (ahem) cleaning up the air,
coal companies are cleaning up their balance sheets to give stockholders
and CEOs better returns, and using bankruptcy laws to bust unions. The
new scheme is for unionized companies with pension liabilities to declare
bankruptcy - during a boom time in the coal business, particularly given
coal's attractiveness compared to $55/barrel oil - and then sell their
operations to each other to re-open with non-union labor. 

Thousands of miners - many with serious health problems - were forced to
watch helplessly this month as their pensions and health benefits
evaporated into thin air with, as New York Times writer James Dao noted,
"a swipe of Judge William S. Howard's pen..."

None of this could have been possible without generous corporate "reforms"
to bankruptcy laws pushed through Congress in the last few years by
conservatives, and the lifetime appointment of conservative judges to
seats on federal courts by conservative administrations. Judge Howard,
for example, was appointed during the reign of George H.W. Bush, and his
decisions continue to destroy union jobs and reduce labor costs for mining
companies under the reign of George W. Bush. 

Unions have been a bulwark of the middle class ever since the presidency
of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Prior to Roosevelt's 1935 Wagner Act, which
guaranteed workers' rights to unionize, America had been mostly either
very rich or very poor. 

At the founding of America, the closest we'd had to a middle class was the
"plowmanry" class Jefferson exalted - small family farmers - who were a
major force in American politics from the time of the Revolution until the
Civil War. But the industrialization of America, and the formation of
huge agricultural monopolies made possible by rail transportation, began
to wipe out the farming middle class (leading to the progressive Grange
movement in the late 1800s), and from that time until 1935 America was
increasingly a Dickensian nation of richer and poorer, with a rapidly
vanishing middle class. 

Workers protested, but conservatives of the Gilded Age held both economic
and political power. Eleven workers were murdered in the Great Railroad
Strike of 1877 when the B&O Railroad cut wages: That year only three
national unions existed, and all were under siege. 

In 1886, Boston police fired into a crowd of protestors - part of 340,000
strikers nationwide - who were calling for a change in the national
workday from 12 hours to 8. One Boston worker died in the hail of police
gunfire that injured scores of others, and four labor leaders were hanged,
seriously crippling the union movement. 

Of the 12 million working families in America in the census of 1890, the
average income for 11 million of them was $380/year (equivalent to about
$7900 today), keeping them deep in poverty. In 1893, federal troops did
battle with railroad strikers in 26 states, breaking a national strike and
sending labor leaders to prison. Eleven years later, while the majority
of American workers were still desperately poor, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish made
society headlines by throwing a dinner party for her dog, who made a grand
entrance wearing a $15,000 diamond collar. 

Following the Wagner Act's implementation, and Roosevelt's raising of the
top marginal income tax rate on multi-millionaires to 90 percent, however,
the first true American middle class came into being. By 1947, over a
third (roughly 35%) of America's workers were unionized, and for every
union job there was a non-union job in the private sector with nearly
identical pay and benefits, because unions had set the floor for labor
costs and employers had to compete for workers. This meant that about 
70%
of American workers were able to raise a family, put children through
school, pay for health care, and plan a good retirement, all on a single
wage earner's salary. During this era, CEOs earned, on average, around 30
to 35 times what their lowest paid employees did, and senior management
salary ratio caps averaging 20:1 were put into place in civil service, the
military, and most colleges. 

But in 1947 the cheap-labor conservatives fought back. In the elections
of 1946, Democrats lost control of both the U.S. House and the Senate,
allowing Republican legislators to push through the Taft-Hartley bill,
which essentially allowed individual states to opt out of portions of the
Wagner act. It was an early domestic version of the "free trade" disaster
we're seeing now with NAFTA and GATT/WTO - a race to the cheap labor
bottom - that started to take root in the American south right after
passage of Taft-Hartley. Although President Harry Truman vetoed the
Taft-Hartley assault on labor, Republicans in the House and Senate
overrode his veto and it became law. 

>From then until the end of the Jimmy Carter presidency, unionization -
and, thus, average worker wages in the United States - only gradually
declined. When Ronald Reagan came into office, a quarter of the American
workforce was unionized, meaning half of Americans could raise a
middle-class family on a single salary. 

But then Reagan declared war on the middle class, starting with the air
traffic controller's union (PATCO) during his first year in office. The
conservative assault on labor has been unrelenting since then: Today only
about 8 percent of the private-sector American workforce is unionized, and
at the same time Education Secretary Rod Paige described the teachers'
union as a "terrorist organization," George W. Bush announced plans to lay
off over 700,000 unionized government employees and replace them with
non-union "contractors." 

While gutting the American middle class, conservatives also launched a
well-funded propaganda campaign - using right-wing "think tanks" and talk
radio - to convince workers that their growing economic woes were the
fault of minorities ("affirmative action") and the poor ("welfare
queens"). At the same time, they began stacking federal benches with
conservative judges, and passing thousands of federal, state, and local
laws, ordinances, and regulations that further weakened the powers of
organized labor and their ability to unionize. 

It's just fine, they said, for capital to organize in the form of a
corporation. It's great when corporations organize into trade
associations, chambers of commerce, industry groups, and lobbying
consortiums. But to have workers organize to level the playing field? 
Inconceivable. 

The result has been an explosion in CEO and executive pay, a rush of
wealth to the conservative elite (the top 10 percent of Americans now own
71 percent of the nation's wealth), and a cut in taxes to a maximum 15
percent for those who "earn their living" by sitting around the pool
waiting for their dividend checks to arrive. 

In 1999, Washington Post writer Dan Balz profiled Karl Rove, pointing to
Rove's affection for the Gilded Age's most aggressive advocate for the
strike-breakers and Robber Barons, and declarer of the Spanish-American
war, President William McKinley (1896-1901). Writes Balz: "'A successful
party,' Rove says of the GOP under McKinley, 'had to take its fundamental
principles and style them in such a way that they seemed to have relevance
to the new economy, the new nature of the country and the new
electorate.'"

So too, today. Will it be Rove's McKinleyian Bush, with a "new economy"
of terrified minimum-wage workers, an entrenched private-jet conservative
elite, and wars in faraway places? Or might John F. Kerry, who often
quotes Franklin D. Roosevelt and is a friend of labor, return America to
its postwar era of a growing middle class, peace, and prosperity? 

"The economy is booming," millionaire TV commentators tell us from their
billion-dollar corporate studio empires. "The economy is creating more
and more wealth," say rich conservatives. And for them, it's true, as
money continues to flow from the working class up to the conservative
elite and billion-dollar corporate tax cuts head legislative agendas.

Americans have a clear choice in this election year, from national to
local elections. But unless average Americans wake up to the scam that's
been foisted on them by the likes of Reagan, Limbaugh, and the Bush
family, the American middle class will continue to evaporate just as fast
as the now-stripped pensions of West Virginia coal miners. 




Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored
Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated
daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books
are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of
Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A 
Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To
Democracy." 

-----


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