The Mason Missile, December 4, 2012

Greetings and Happy Holidays-all of them! My volume of poetry, Mutterings, is now available on Amazon and Kindle. (Still, I urge you to patronize your friendly neighborhood independent bookstore, where you'll also find it.) My Amazon author page is amazon.com/author/masonjohn. Again, we have the tradition of the holidays, along with the playing of Bing Crosby and Dean Martin of Christmas songs, of artificially contrived controversy over religions respecting each others' holidays. It used to be it was the Nativity scene on the grounds of the county courthouse, how that violated the separation of church and state, favoring one religion over others-and there are other religions besides Christianity. It's one of the great things in this country that there isn't supposed to be ONE predominant religion; but religion does pop up in public discourse. In the period of our history before the Civil War, people were terrified of Catholics, and that the Pope would take over the nation. Anti-Semitism cropped up, especially with the immigrants coming in from Eastern Europe, and certain hotels, restaurants, and universities would ban Jews from entering. Now, our Muslim fellow citizens, unfortunately, have to go through the same damn thing. Last year saw bills in state legislatures prohibiting Sharia (Islamic) law being made official law in the government. This is from legislators in a political movement who use their alleged "Christian" religion as an excuse to deny women the right to control their own bodies and deny the most basic human rights to Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) people. Plus, we have, through Fox "News," stories of Christians being "discriminated" against, allegedly being told they can't say "Merry Christmas," and like that. It's as if some people think that discrimination is the way of the world; if WE don't oppress THEM, THEY'LL oppress US. It's as if mutual respect isn't possible, and it's either domination or submission of one group or another. The psychological device of "projection" comes to play here: the right-wing Christians have a deep authoritarian streak in them, but they deny it and accuse others of such a tendency. Along with this comes the tedious whine about (God forgive me for using this phrase) "Political Correctness," the idea that you should be ashamed of yourself for complaining about racism-sexism-homophobia-poverty-etc. Like every other catchphrase of the Right, this comes from the Left, the complaint about pedants, cranks, and extremists going too far and chasing red herrings. Still, racism, sexism, homophobia AND poverty remain very real, and we have to combat them. Me, I go after the sharks and barracudas in our economy an dour society that devour poor and working people, I don't waste time with red herrings. The aforementioned sharks and barracudas, our plutocratic class, remains furious with workers that we stood up to them, and voted against their candidate Mitt Romney. Their revenge is to lay off workers supposedly because they "can't afford" the Obama health care plan. "We took your job from you, so blame Obama and the Democrats." No, we WON'T! If not for the workers working to make your corporations profitable, you'd be nothing. And what do YOU do for the company, other than play with stock options and pay off politicians to skew the tax code in your favor, and try to profit from closing down plants in THIS country, taking jobs from AMERICAN workers living and paying taxes in AMERICAN communities, and shipping the plants to impoverished nations, where you pay pocket change for a day's wages, and the government can be counted on to beat down workers trying to organize? You call it "class warfare?" You've been waging it ever since the New Deal, the last time we counted on leaving you in sole charge with running the economy, when the government, working with sensible corporate executives, and trying to head off a revolution, sought to ease the economic burden of the depression by implementing Social Security and supporting workers' right to organize. From that time on, you tried to rewrite history to deny the effects of the Depression, and to regain your old power, trying to beat back every institution that could get in your way, like unions. Plus, the government has shifted, a little, since the New Deal, from being the enforcer of corporate power to trying to accommodate workers and consumers, to making certain their concerns are heard in the halls of the State, with regulations on occupational safety, fair wages and hours, non-discrimination in housing, preventing pollution in air, water and food, etc. All this was done, not from the beneficence of the State, but by working and poor people coming together into unions and community groups for their benefit. You plutocrats fought against those things as well-for what, a few extra points in the stock market? Is that all you know about? If so, should we therefore trust the affairs of government to your kind? No we won’t! The idea of government of, by and for the people can still be made real. We can all take a part in bringing this forth, and rest assured, I’ll do mine. Bye!

The Mason Missile, November 13, 2012

Greetings, freedom fighters! Bragging time-I have a volume of poetry, titled Mutterings, which I put on CreateSpace, a self-publishing website affiliated with Amazon.com. I went through the process of downloading the text and using the template for creating the cover, and it's now available on createspace.com, and amazon.com; it’s also available on Kindle. This new technology-YouTube, internet radio, print-on-demand publishing-is great for working people to get our message across; we don't have to worry about the corporate bureaucracy rejecting us and/or editing our messages to the point of distortion. Still we have to do the job right, pay attention to our writing skills and keep our facts right, so that the world knows we can speak eloquently about ourselves and our lives. As the old Wobbly Big Bill Haywood said, "The brains to run society is under the cap of the worker." Needless to say I’m overjoyed with the results of the presidential election. I wish President Obama all the best for the next four years. The House, alas, is still Republican, but the Senate is still Democratic. However, same sex marriage was voted on by referendum, in Maryland and Maine-by popular vote, in spite of what religious rightists say about same-sex marriage being unpopular. A referendum in Minnesota that would have declared marriage as a union between a man and a woman was voted down. Colorado and Washington state voted to legalize recreational use of marijuana, challenging the so-called “War on Drugs,” which has been a backdoor attack on minorities. It has proven no more successful than Prohibition of alcohol in the 1920’s and ’30s, which led to the growth of both organized crime and municipal corruption, as well as cynicism-people knew the law was nonsense, so they went into the speakeasy. (I myself had a few tokes in my day.) PLUS-Puerto Rico passed a non-binding resolution calling for statehood. The political establishment has long resisted this, since it would challenge the idea of the United States as a nation of Northern-European descended peoples. My confidence in the Democratic party as a vehicle for social change, alas, in next to nil. After we treat ourselves to a well deserved celebration, let us get back to the business of social change; it’s always bee grassroots movements of downtrodden people that have created anything positive in this country, and not any benevolent state acting on its own. The right-wing movement acts as if the “big government” things they hate so much, such as occupational-safety and health, regulation of the financial sector, Civil Rights legislation, Social Security, etc., have always been there, and they never confronted why they were instituted in the first place; and they want us to rely on the “free market,” and we would, each of us, be left on our own. The talk of “rugged individualism,” of people going out by themselves, is simply a propaganda tool dressed in intellectual-historical garb by hired tools in academia and the media. It is perfectly natural for people to unite with each other, for whatever reason. Disturbing development-Such corporations as Papa John's Pizza and Applebee's Restaurants are planning to lay off workers, in retaliation for the Obama victory, supposedly over paying health insurance to the workers, without whom these firms would never run. (Can you say boycott?) Murray Energy, an Ohio-based coal company, laid off 156 workers supposedly because of the Obama administration’s “war on coal”; this was the same company that ordered its workers to stand as props for Mitt Romney at a campaign rally-without pay. Corporations spent up to billions of dollars towards the Romney campaign -money that could have been spent on such luxury items as health care, increased wages, and occupational safety for their employees, plus paying a lit-tle more in taxes to pare down the deficit they worry about; all of these things they whine will bankrupt them. But noooo, they have to spend their money on political candidates they pull from out of nowhere, pay for their campaigns, and when they get elected return the favors by voting for the corporations’ favorite causes, like slicing their taxes; allowing them to move their factories to poorer countries where they can pay their workers pocket change for a day’s work, and union organizing is a crime; and where they are free of regulations so they can pollute the air and water, overcharge for utilities, discriminate against women and minorities for ANY reason, commit stock fraud (I’m thinking Enron)-the list is endless what would happen if corporations got free reign. These are the geniuses running our economy? The creative minds celebrated by Ayn Rand? They do SO need regulating, we cannot trust our economy, our society, or our lives with such “persons” as these corporations, or the people who run them and are bred by them. This is the terrible “class warfare” the Republicans have accused somewhat leftward Democrats of waging, if they proposed even the slightest increase in taxes for the corporations. But they have been the ones waging class warfare on working people-I WON’T use the mealy-mouth phrase “middle class.” Ever since the end of the New Deal, they have fought to regain the plutocratic privileges they justly lost, after they led the country into the 1929 Depression. I guess these laying-off corporations expect their workers to come crawling back on their bellies and beg for their jobs back. I say stand up to them, as you would any bully. Get in touch with a union that is appropriate to the industry you work for, so you can fight back. After all, the corporate executive can’t dig the coal, wait on the tables, and cook the food themselves. They need the workers more than the workers need them. Get on the AFL-CIO website, aflcio.org, to find a suitable union. Another worrisome thing-There have been petition drives in several states, with signatures in the tens of thousands, to secede from the Union, after the Obama reelection. The one from Texas attained around 60,000 signatures. Would these states actually try it? What should we do in this case? Let them go? Another Civil War? I remember during the Viet Nam war, the “patriotic” slogan was “America, love it or leave it!” (Don’t you love it when complicated issues can be boiled down to bumper stickers?) But how did they define “America”? A white, Protestant entity, comprised of small towns and farms, where people didn’t have to confront serious issues as racial-gender-religious discrimination, class dominance and poverty, or unnecessary war? Where they defined “democracy” as going along with whatever the Leader said, and expressing opposing ideas was a sin and a crime? I believe America is being remade into its better self, a country where education, health care, and public safety and not luxuries, where workers use their brains and their skill for the betterment of their communities, and which actually believes that all persons are equal, in the law and in society. I laugh at Victoria Jackson’s tweet, “America died last night”, the night of November 6; I say, with our minds and work, we can bring to birth a new, better America. Bye!

The Mason Missile, October 22, 2012

Greetings, freedom fighters! I honor the memory of George McGovern, who passed away at the age of ninety. I took a LOT of shit from the other kids in the rural township I grew up in for being pro-McGovern; but I don't regret it, I believe it was the way to go. I believe in standing on principle, don't stick your finger in the wind and try to figure out which opinions are fashionable. One phrase I have kept hearing from conservatives is about the "left-liberal-slanted news media." It's a convenient scapegoat for them to bring up, for when facts don't go their way, like in how the Viet Nam war fared for our government, or how unpopular the war had become, or of the rightness of the Civil Rights movement or the other freedom movements that came from it, such as for women, LGBT people, Native Americans, Hispanics, etc. The phrase "working the ref," from baseball, describes the conservatives attempt to bully and dominate the news media-the coach of a team accuses the referee of bias in favor of the other team, hoping the referee will in future be biased his way. But if the referee knows he's being "worked," and if he has a modicum of backbone, he could see through this act and resist it. In fact, there is a cultural-psychological bias in favor of conservatism; behaviors that would put a left-wing person behind bars are overlooked when right-wing people do them. The "Tea Party" pseudo-movement is a case in point: lunatics raved in congressional town-halls about the Obama health care plan, threatening congress-members with violence; people have come to anti-Obama rallies carrying firearms, ranting about "second Amendment solutions"; and during the health care debate, gunshots were fired at congressional offices, and crowds to tea-party-ites threatened congress-members, using racial slurs and spitting on one. If a leftist organization did these things, the FBI would come down on them HARD. The truth is the "mainstream news" media errs to the right, not offending corporations (such as the media are), hinting at us how we should think about issues. Even NPR I notice biases towards the Republicans when it discusses the election and how Congress (mis)handles such issues as the federal budget deficit (rung up under George W. Bush) and not mentioning how the Congressional Republican (mis)leadership just acts out of denying Obama a second term. No matter how "liberal" a portion of the news media or a politician is, there is the tendency to try to control any up-and-coming social protest movement, be it the Civil Rights movement or feminism. Such movements challenge conventional modes of thinking and thus of governing, and so the establishment parties and media have to adjust to bring them under control, such as bringing in women and minorities to work for them, to give at least the impression of sensitivity to social change; the question remains whether they're more focused on advancing their minority group of their own rise within the system. The establishment, be it political, media, or industrial/financial, selects only its most faithful servants. For my part, I noticed the "mainstream news" media follow the Occupy movement a couple of weeks after it started at Wall Street; alternative media sites, like Buzzflash and AlterNet, followed it first, and the corporate media picked up on it later. It's corporate owners who dictate to their editors what the news should be; Fox News is the most horrific example, but it's the same way with other news outlets. I believe that you read the "mainstream" news first, to get a baseline for what's going on, but also read alternative media to get deeper into the issue; and try to get hold of foreign media, they would have a far different, maybe better, perspective of events than American media does. Here is the reality we face now-the old civics-lessons about politics, of reaching a compromise after debate and discussion, do not apply to the current Republican party. It has been taken over by elements of the right that such conservative icons as Barry Goldwater and Bill Buckley sought to drive out-the John Birch Society (which called Dwight Eisenhower, and veteran military man, a Communist agent), the disciples of Ayn Rand (who extolled selfishness as the greatest of virtues and called workers and other low-income people “moochers,” “parasites,” and “barefoot bums”), the kind of racists who rallied around George Wallace for President in 1968, and science-hating religious fundamentalists who want to decide women‘s right to contraception and how their bodies function. Racial hatred, fired by the presence of a Black man as President, is the fuel running many in the Republican party. Bullying, a form of terrorism, is in their playbook, in the form of shouting down speakers in town-halls and terrorizing people standing in line to exercise their right to vote, paid for with the blood and sweat of brave activists; a group allied with the tea Parties, called “True The Vote,” is a crew of self-appointed right-wing sheriffs who would dare to challenge the qualifications of people voting. Enough is enough! Let’s get ready to stand up to these creeps! Let us get out there and VOTE, and take control of our country, and place it on a positive path! Bye!

The Mason MIssile, September 30, 2012

Greetings, freedom fighters! I have been celebrating the High Holy Days, Rosh haShona and Yom Kippur; I bid everyone within the sound of my newsletter a happy, sweet, and prosperous new year, with all abundance in good things coming to you and your loved ones. The beauty of the High Holy Days is that we can reflect on the past, without being enslaved or trapped in what when on then. We’ve made mistakes, sure, but we can move beyond them. Good news to you I'll tell-I have been accepted for Masters' work in labor studies at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst-YAY! It will be a two-week-per-semester program aimed at union activists and officials. Labor education in very important; we have to know what our predecessors went through for future generations of workers to have decent wages, medical benefits, occupational safety and health, etc. It’s at the work site, the shop floor, where social justice issues become concrete, they go from the abstract to the practical. How can I not say anything about the presidential election? I have no other choice but to endorse for President of the United States-Barack Obama. I also worried whether he gave in to easily to the Republicans, such as the departure on his officials Van Jones and Shirley Sherrod, over lies concocted through the rightist media machine; also with his trying to reason with the Tea Party affiliated congress-idiots, hell bent on bringing him down, no matter what damage it does to the nation’s reputation and credit rating. But he has stood up, with his repeal of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” rule concerning LGBT service members, his support of same-sex marriage, and of reproductive rights for women. Hopefully, he can overcome the idea, within the wall Street faction of the Democratic party (exemplified by Clinton-era Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin), on concentrating on making the banks happy and ignore everyone else. The fight to retain voting rights goes on. People have braved police assaults, fire hoses, and lynching for the right to peaceably change their government and affect policy. Republican state legislators have rammed through bills, signed by Republican governors-how convenient!-to have only certain forms of identification acceptable to show at voting stations. Certain demographic groups, such as students, the elderly, and minorities may not have the appropriate ID to show on election day-and, quite conveniently for SOME, these groups tend towards Democrats. Fortunately, there have been fights in the courts to legally invalidate these laws, along with efforts to see that the affected people do have appropriate ID; the labor movement, I’m proud to say, has taken a lead in this work. But beware! There is a group out, called True The Vote, affiliated with the Tea Party “Astroturf” thing-I won’t all it a movement-that would go to voting stations and, like some sort of self-appointed police, demand to see voters’ IDs, to intimidate them. Let’s be aware of this, and be ready to stand up to these types. I urge us to meet and set up a plan to fight this. The idea of a Mitt Romney presidency should chill everybody’s back. Here is a man who has spoken with scorn about the same people whose votes he would need, mocking them as moochers for government handouts (thank you, Mother Jones); whose whole career has been finding troubled companies, loading them with debts they could never pay off, bankrupting them, and laying off workers; and whose entire life has been one of ignorance of the lives of people not as well off as he has been, and who has caused suffering to people less powerful, like the supposedly Gay kid in his prep school. His running mate Paul Ryan, (still running for his Wisconsin House seat while running for Vice-President-huh?), proclaimed his adherence to the writing of Ayn Rand, even ordering his staff to read Atlas Shrugged, a terribly written fantasy of rich people going into hiding because the lower orders don’t like them-that is how Ryan gets his economic doctrine. Passivity and apathy, brothers and sisters, are not in order. We must get our minds together, get our IDs ready, and take the time out to VOTE. We CAN and WILL win this thing! Bye!

The Mason Missile, September 2, 2012

Greetings, freedom fighters! I will celebrate Labor Day, the day to honor American workers. I am also active in the campaign, led ably in Philadelphia by Jim Moran, to restore May Day as a workers' holiday in the United States, as it is in the rest of the world; we ARE part of the wider world. The Republican convention has come and gone; the Democratic convention, at this writing, is next. During the primary season, and all through the Obama administration, the Republicans and the organized right-wing movement have used race-baiting and threats as part of their collective message. Recently there was a plot, by Army soldiers, to assassinate the President; they killed a man who they thought would expose the plot. There have been pictures on placards of Obama as a witch doctor, with his head on a spike, and a sick parody of the famous "Hope" poster with his head in a noose. I could go on, but suffice it to say THIS is what our politics has gotten to. Racism in very real in this election. A Romney TV ad accused Obama of waiving work requirements for welfare; that wasn't true, but they'll continue with it anyway, bragging they won't be dictated to by "fact-checkers." Plus, Newt Gingrich referred to Obama as a "food stamp President" and a "fried chicken President"; how much more racially coded can you get? You don't need the CIA to break that code! Meanness and stupidity are utilized by the Republicans in this election, playing to racial bigotry and misinformation. Do the Republican leaders, from Romney on down, think this is how you appeal to the American people, how THEY envision America? Perhaps they get that vision from the Tea Parties and the people they attract. Many of them are afraid the government would take over their Social Security and Medicare- which ARE government programs! (Is THIS why republican governors want to make cuts in education- an educated electorate, thinking for itself rather than Fox "News" doing it for them, is such a threat to corporate-state power?) It's a puzzling conglomeration running the Republican party-corporate state advocates (calling themselves "libertarians"), who want the government out of their business except to support their businesses, in the same party with religious extremists who want to control what people learn in school, what they read and watch, what kinds of sex practices are acceptable-things that the corporate capitalist class could give two shits about. But just as a general staff in an army needs foot soldiers to get killed for their glory, the plutocrats running our politics and our politicians need foot soldiers to do the essential political grunt work- phone banking, handing out leaflets, stuffing envelopes, and going to the polls and pulling the leavers. For the religious fundamentalists, their vision is limited by their hatred toward the world and the changes that go on in it, such as the liberation of women and LGBT people, the honest discussion of sexuality, and scientific research. Social change has always been a long-haul affair, while the news media focuses too much on immediate horse-race displays of electoral campaigns. After the 1977 campaign led by Anita Bryant against gays and lesbians working as school teachers succeeded, right-wing pundits acted like that would be the final word on the matter-gays and lesbians should and would go back into the closet and shut up. Also with the failure of the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, it was expected that the Feminist movement would come to an end. Crusades against abortion became militant, with threats of terror or real terror, such as the assassination of Dr. George Tiller. BUT-several states AND our sitting President have come out for same-sex marriage; rules against LGBT military personnel serving openly have been repealed; birth control remains a strong issue among women. It's all about dedicated people, who have a vision of a just, fair nation, like we're are supposed to be about, doing the work needed to bring that about. Yet-it's been implied that, since the plutocrats and their political hacks-I'm thinking about the Koch brothers, among others-have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in TV ads to broadcast their lies, to try to make us forget the previous eight years of George W. Bush and the policies his crew pursued-tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, no regulation of ANY industry (including the stock market), cuts in every federal program that wasn't military or didn't go to a supporting religious group, and two unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to prop up corrupt regimes. (This is a pattern that has gone on since the start of the “Cold War,” the assumption that every foreign government that tried to use its power to benefit its people-such as Mohammad Moseddeq of Iran, and Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala- were ipso facto communist and had to be brought down. The pattern continued through the war in Viet Nam, and on through the Contra war in Nicaragua and the support of Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran. The Romney foreign policy team has the same geniuses who organized and promoted the Iraq invasion in the Bush II administration; I see SOME people don’t learn from history.) This has lead to trillions of dollars of a federal deficit, a roaring crash in the aforesaid stock market, businesses closing while their CEOs get millions of dollars of bonuses, and the loss of respect for this country in the world. Do we want that again? Do we want to listen to the media say to us again, “You guy’s gonna lose, so don’t bother to vote”? Let us exercise our independence minds, as we look at the election-and beyond. Bye!

Greetings, freedom fighters! On August 1st I celebrated my 55th birthday; on that day I began my time on the City of Philadelphia's Deferred Retirement Option Plan (DROP), whereby I stay at my job for up to four years, and then I retire with a bonus along with my pension. These wonderful things have come forth through the work of the union, along with medical, optical, and dental insurance, so that I and so many other workers can live and retire with a decent lifestyle (hint, hint). This has been done by the work over decades-centuries-of dedicated activists, men and women who risked their lives-some even losing their lives-so that they, their coworkers, their families, and descendants could live a decent life. I am well read of the history of the labor movement, with such events as the Bread and Roses Strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912, of mainly immigrant and female textile workers; the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911, where Jewish and Italian immigrant female workers died, either from the fire or from trying to jump away from it, because the owners of the company had the bright idea to lock the fire exits; the Haymarket massacre in 1886, where labor activists, campaigning for something so mundane as the eight-hour workday, were accused to killing police officers and were executed-murdered!-by the state of Illinois; the Pullman railroad car strike led by Eugene Debs; the campaigns of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW); the organizing drive of Pullman porters in the 1920s and 30s, led by A. Philip Randolph; the organizing of farm workers by Cesar Chavez- the list goes on. All through these campaigns, corporations called upon their hirelings-"security" thugs, police, military, politicians, the ("Left liberal slanted") news media of the day, clergy- to put down the workers organizing. The slur "union thug" is not new, people have forever been told that unions are nests of criminals and/or Communists. Still, the goals of the unions, imperfect though they are, have been established: Social Security, Medicare, pensions, occupational health and safety standards, health benefits, and time just to be around the spouse and kids. But for the past thirty years, unions, and their achievements, have been attacked: I recall vividly the breaking of the air-traffic controllers union (which, by the way, supported Reagan), the weakening of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), companies moving their factories AND their jobs overseas. For that same era, we were barraged in the media by propaganda against the role of government in dealing with workers' issues and other social issues, such as Civil Rights for women and minorities, dealing with poverty, consumer protection, etc. "Get the government off our backs," was the Reagan war cry-what did that mean? If ever they got to specifics, it meant destroying Social Security, Medicare, Food Stamps, education funding, occupational safety and health, consumer protection-the list goes on. But, the idea was never to cut down or out spending on the military, which is where spending has always been tremendous, and the risk of corruption is greatest. Defense corporations have established their plants in certain congressional districts, to force members of Congress to keep voting for aircraft, armored vehicles, and other items that either don't work or are not necessary-not even the Pentagon brass asks for some of this stuff-or else workers in the plants lose their jobs, along with the paychecks that pay the bills, and no one wants to take peoples jobs away. Plus, we have the increase during the time of conservative-Republican hegemony of greater surveillance of citizens acting out their rights to protest their government's stupidity; during the Reagan administration's support of the psychopathic, loose-cannon military repressions in El Salvador, I have worked along with the Committee In Solidarity With The People of El Salvador (CISPES), and have met refugees from the homicidal repressions in El Salvador seeking support from churches in the Sanctuary movement; the FBI took a strong interest in such movements, just like it did the Civil Rights and anti-Viet Nam war movements. For spending on the military and secret-police functions-traditional functions of government-as far as the Republican rights-wing thinks, the sky's the limit. It was due to huge military spending, along with cuts in taxes for the wealthiest Americans, we had deficits surpassing all the previous presidential administrations combined; you can't blame them on Food Stamps, Pell Grants, the EPA or OSHA, non-traditional functions of government. The glorification of the business-corporate class has a long history in this country, with the belief that the American businessman can do anything, and that government ought to be "run like a business;" that myth grew in strength starting in the Age of Reagan and continued, up until the crash of 2008. The Rich and the Super Rich, the classic book by Ferdinand Lundberg dating back to 1968, chronicles the interplay between government/politics and the corporate class, with executives holing up in their exclusive clubs making deals, wealthy families establishing how to perpetuate their wealth, politicians doing everything they can for their campaign donors, etc. Contrary to the Reagan-rightist-corporate propaganda line, corporate executives and their stockholding masters have never been this oppressed minority group. From Reagan up to today, however, the attempt was to remove the last administrative restraints on corporate crime-stock manipulation (which could have prevented Enron and Bernie Madoff), environmental regulation (which could have prevented the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico), occupational safety and health (which could have prevented the deaths of miners in West Virginia), the wholesale closing of factories and exporting the work to low-wage countries (thus taking jobs away from workers, so they can't pay their mortgages and utilities; impoverishing communities; closing small businesses like mom-and-pop groceries; reducing the tax base to that municipalities can't pay for police, fire and garbage collection; and weakening the manufacturing capabilities of the nation). Lundberg pointed out in 1968 how short-sighted the corporate elite has been, with no breath of vision, thinking of nothing but the bottom line. This was evident to me during the Iraq war of 2003, a great moment of shame for this country; the buildings in Baghdad related to the oil industry were secured, but the museums and other cultural institutions were left alone to be vandalized and ransacked by hoodlums Saddam Hussein released from his prisons-thereby demolishing five millennia of human history! And what was the response of Donald Rumsfeld? "Stuff happens!" That is the mentality of the ruling political-economic elite-no knowledge of the world or its history, or of foreign cultures or peoples, just the drive to expand corporate profits-of whatever corporation-for the Bush II administration, it was Halliburton and Bechtel. Of course there has come up the whine about “big government” oppressing entrepreneurs trying to make a profit on their genius. That has proven to be a red herring the size of a school of whales. For as long as there has been capitalism, 1. governments and corporations have worked hand in glove with each other, 2. nations that were originally clusters of small duchies and principalities-Germany, France, and Italy-each unified into a single national state-entity, with one single standard to weights and measures, one single currency, one single tax system, and one single military apparatus-all important in the development of capitalism. The United States also followed this pattern. in its first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, the arrangement was more like a league of independent republics, like the original thirteen colonies were. Each state had its own currency, and each faced rebellions of farmers and Revolutionary war veterans, such as Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts in 1786-87; there, farmers and veterans, squeezed by the post-war depression and harsh governmental austerity measures, shut down courts engaged in tax and debt collection, and they raised a militia against the state government. Originally, the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1797 considered merely tightening up the provisions of the Articles; but they gave up the Articles and formulated a new, centralized structure. Alexander Hamilton, the godfather of what was to become the Federalist party, advocated a semi-aristocratic system for the country, favoring the emerging industrial capitalists being dominant in government; one of his projects, the Bank of the United States, was part of this aristocratic system. Thus, “big government’ was there, to benefit the financial elite of this country. Only when formerly oppressed groups-workers, consumers, women, ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities-attempt to utilize the federal government as an ally to alleviate their repression do we hear the whine of “big government.” And the corporate news-entertainment media don’t tell us the back-story of why the government got involved in such things as urban improvement, occupational safety and health, civil rights enforcement, consumer protection, environmental protection; or the efforts to persuade the government officials of the need for such protections. The fight is on, brothers and sisters. The corporate masters and their deluded foot-soldiers in the “tea party” thing (I won’t call it a “movement”) will try to terrorize us out of asserting our rights; but we’ve proven adept in standing up to them, and we’ll continue to do so, and we WILL win. Bye!

Greetings, freedom fighters! Happy Fourth of July! This is the day we commemorate the Declaration of Independence, the great document that contains the words, “All men are created equal,” and which expounds the ideas, based on the European Enlightenment, of the ability of humans to govern their political and personal lives. Alas, recently I passed by Independence Hall, the place where those great words were proclaimed-and I saw the foundations of the slave quarters where George Washington’s slaves lived. The “Founding Fathers” of this country, the white affluent men who signed the Declaration and the Constitution in 1787, were sensitive to this terrible reality, slavery in a nation which prides itself on liberty; but they did not, unfortunately, free any slaves. It is this that the Tea-Party "movement"- a collection of unconscious racists, gun junkies, religious fundamentalists, and self-centered "libertarians," subsidized by the Koch brothers and other corporations-refer to, the myth of the American Revolution overthrowing tyranny. It's as if the following 236 years did not take place, during which time we had the Civil war and the abolition of slavery; the movements for the liberation of workers, women, African-Americans, LGBT people, Hispanic-descended people, Asian-descended people, and the disabled; radical ideas as national health insurance, Social Security, pensions, day care centers-this is the start. The Tea Party-ites invoke the signers of the Declaration of Independence, who were indeed great and brave men; but they were also affluent white men, who lived in an era when social hierarchy, a society of superiors and inferiors, was the norm. Is that what we're headed to, something we're supposed to have rebelled against? I rejoice at the Supreme Court-under Chief Justice John Roberts, of ALL people!- has upheld the Obama health care plan-which is far short of what I hope for, a single-payer system like in Europe and Canada. It accommodates the private insurance companies, to make it palatable to corporations and their political lackeys. But it’s ONE step in the right direction. The Republicans are in such a state that nothing the President does works for them; they want to bring him down, the public welfare be damned. One thing bandied about by the Mitt Romney campaign is the phrase "American Exceptionalism," the idea, espoused both by liberals and conservatives, that the United States of America is special and unique among the nations of the earth, because of our supposed “democracy.” John Kennedy said, “More than any other people on Earth, we bear burdens and accept risks unprecedented in their size and their duration, not for ourselves alone but for all who wish to be free." Romney has used that phrase as if Obama, the current President of the United States, does not believe that about the nation he presides over. Kennedy’s statement sums up the worse traits of “American Exceptionalism” in a nutshell; it brings up images of Kipling’s ”White Man’s Burden,” as if the US of A is especially commissioned (by who? God) to bring democracy and civilization to the poor nations of the world, as if We know what’s best for them. Alas, it didn’t work out that way; during the Cold War after the Second World War, our government allied itself with the most reprehensible dictatorships-Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Batista in Cuba, Marcos in the Philippines, Somoza in Nicaragua, the murderous juntas in Guatemala and El Salvador, the Shah of Iran, and the apartheid regime in South Africa. Under the cover of “Exceptionalism,” our government, paid for with OUR taxes, supported these regimes, and our nation lost the respect of its people after the regimes were finally overthrown-not by any Soviet-Cuban conspiracy, but by the efforts of activists risking their lives for the betterment of their peoples. This self-centered, egotistical attitude is not good for America; it only benefits politicians who are embedded with corporations that want to break unions and their representation of workers and to cancel environmental laws, health and safety laws, and civil rights because they cut into the profit margin. It would also, if Romney (Lord, no!) got elected, put back into office the George W. Bush foreign policy team, the same geniuses that got us into war in Iraq over weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, but was a way to remake a portion of the world into an uncontrolled “free market” image, which damn sure isn’t working in this country, with plants closing and corporate CEOs, such as Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, who lost $2 billion of the company’s money, but kept his job and received a pay increase; he was rewarded for a two billion dollar blunder! THAT’S the model we’re exporting throughout the world? My fellow Americans, the true patriot wants the BEST for his/her country, to cause it to do the right thing, for its own people and for the rest of the world. Let us break out (like I did) our copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and actually read them, and cause our country to truly put them into practice. Let us discuss these things as we enjoy our beers and hot dogs. Bye!