The Mason Missile, June 23, 2013

Greetings! On Memorial Day, I have been honoring the persons who fell in the military service on the United States-which is not the same as honoring the wars they were made or conned into fighting. Coming up will be Independence Day, where we recall the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the document which speaks of all men being equal-a document, alas, written by and among wealthy white men who were born in a highly hierarchical society. In American society there was to hereditary nobility, but there was a sense of hierarchy, the idea that owners of land and slaves were inherently superior to bricklayers, cobblers, and other working people. Laws in the Revolutionary and immediate post-Revolutionary (Federalist) era limited the right to vote to white males who owned so much land and so many slaves, and the laws would be to the benefit of such a class, since people of such a class interacts with each other, and believes that their benefit is the benefit of the entire nation. Alas, we have not been faithful to the ideals of the Declaration; at home, we have tolerated and abetted oppression of non-white minorities-Hispanic, African-descended people, and Native people-and have violently repressed workers attempting to organize for their rights; abroad, our government has overthrown democratically elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, supported the Apartheid regime of South Africa, and upheld such pet dictators as Bautista in Cuba, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Marcos in the Philippines, and Somoza in Nicaragua. As patriotic Americans, we have to learn and pay attention to this; I believe a true American, either native-born or an immigrant, believes and acts upon the belief in equality and democracy-even though the Constitution does not use the word "democracy." It may be necessary, now that I think about it, to review the Constitution to update our governmental system, to remove impediments to good laws being passed. The Constitution was written and ratified in the late 1780s and early 1790s, an era, like I said, of hierarchy in society, when laws were written by and for rich, white, slave-holding males. The rules of the United States Senate were written so that one single senator could deny permission for the chamber to proceed with business; the southern senators used those tricks to block much of the Civil rights laws of the 1950s and 1960s; that needs revising. The Electoral College, the source of trouble in the 2000 election, the manipulation of which brought George W. Bush into office (and Dick Cheney into power) definitely has GOT to go. Another thing that needs revising is the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which reads thus: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." this was written at a time, just after the Revolutionary War, when one of the grievances of the colonists was being forced to house British soldiers, and the fear that a standing army could be the instrument of power for a dictator. The Framers of the Declaration of Independence, brought up in the European Enlightenment and English history, knew of Roman history, of Caesar marching on Rome with his legions and dominating the world, and of Cromwell establishing his Puritan state in England. The military was NOT the trillion-dollar colossus it is today. Therefore, the bulk of the military at that era was a militia comprised of every white male in the community, and it was mandatory for them to own a firearm-and the firearms of that era were single-shot muskets, where after you fired a shot, you poured the powder in, stuffed the wadding paper in, rammed the ball in, and then you fired again. If there were at that time Uzis and AK47s, would the Second Amendment not be amended somewhat? I think so. The conservative movement shows again its institutionalized ignorance in the non-scandal over alleged monitoring of Tea Party groups in Ohio by the IRS. The tea parties started with yelling at and threatening Congress-members at town halls during the debate over the Obama health care plan (which, by the way, is very good for the health insurance companies), and yelled at and spat at members after the vote was taken, and who shot at Congressional offices. People like that, gullible people who could be riled up with hysterical lies, are not interested in anyone’s civil liberties. Unfortunately, the Obama administration announced they would take these allegations seriously, and the IRS official at the center of this got into trouble. It’s the same with the Department of Homeland Security report in the first Obama administration, which showed how right-wing extremists are a threat to national safety and security, and the Fox News crowd and its allies howled that their rights were being taken from them, and DHS disregarded the report, even though the report, and the threat was real. The conservative movement remains the spoiled children of American politics, which even the most Liberal President (whoever s/he is) simply MUST satisfy and make happy-but it never happens that way, it never works. Bill Clinton tried to co-opt the conservatives’ crusade against “welfare as we know it,” using their slogans to his own campaigns, and signing the draconian welfare “reform’ law; but they still tried to have him impeached over a blowjob. Similarly, Obama feels he has to appease the Republicans sometimes, but they remain the party whose base is full of people who refuse to believe he was even born in this country, who refuse to accept the scientific fact of global warming and the danger to the environment, and who refuse to accept the right of same-sex couples to marry or of women to control their own birthing processes. The conservative movement has long used “law and order” as a slogan, using fears of crime-and who isn’t afraid of getting robbed, raped and killed?-to gain political mileage? And the liberals played along, not wanting to be “soft on crime.” On the global scale during the Cold War, liberals had to prove they also were not “soft on communism,” and that led to having to support dictators, like the ones I mentioned above, at war with their own people. But conservatives, still in denial of the failure of the “free enterprise system” to solve the 1929 Depression, and of the necessity of state intervention in the form of the New Deal, still linked liberals with Socialism (like it’s a BAD thing), and Socialism with Communism, a repressive system indeed, a diseased mutation that has nothing to do with true Socialism. The conservatives are the heirs of those who glorified Joe McCarthy, whose congressional inquisitions terrorized people into silence over social issues, and cost talented people their jobs. The important movements of the 1960s, Civil Rights and anti-Viet-Nam War, were accused of Communist infiltration, by the Birch Society and the FBI, and were heavily monitored and infiltrated in the COINTEL program, where the FBI sought to disrupt and undermine the movements; the Bureau also spied on and infiltrated groups in the '1980s that opposed the Reagan administration's support for the Nicaraguan contras and the juntas in El Salvador and Guatemala, and the groups opposed to the Bush II administration's disastrous war in Iraq. Compromise is not in the cards is our current politics; we must stand fast on our principles, and take pride in what we believe in. Let us rest up during the summer, enjoy the cook-outs and days at the beach, and then get ready to rumble for the people. Bye!

The Mason Missile, April 27, 2013

Greetings! At this present time I'm working on my relaxation skills; I have spent a LOT of time on my job and outside activities, I have to take time for ME, for MY benefit and health. This advice comes from my counselor at the Council For Relationships (councilforrelationships.org), and I'm following up on it. we all deserve downtime; we can't keep pushing ourselves like pack mules, we can be our own worst taskmasters. I have been, with my wonderful congregation, Leyv Ha-Ir (leyvhair.org), celebrating Purim, the wild and crazy holiday where we commemorate the downfall of the tyrant Haman (boo!), prime minister of the Persian king Ahashueras (eh!), at the hands of Mordechai (yay!) and his niece, the beautiful queen Esther (woo hoo!). The Megillah of Esther reads like a weird, comedy-soap opera, with the most implausible situations that just happen to work together, but the point is the downfall of a tyrant and the raising-up of those the tyrant would kill. I have also been celebrating Pesach, or (Passover), the celebration of the liberation of our ancestors, the ancient Israelites, from slavery in Egypt. The crossing the Red Sea symbolizes, to me, the point of no return back to slavery; but the Hebrews, to the constant grief of Moses, maintain a slave mentality, fearing the unknown, having no faith in themselves due to their former slave masters telling them they were nothing but dumb cattle to be worked to death, whining about returning to Egypt where at least they had SOME food. Both holidays represent, to me, the overthrow of tyrants, internal and external: external, meaning tyrants and dictators, be they large scale despots like Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, the apartheid regime of South Africa, Marcos in the Philippines, Battista in Cuba, or Somoza in Nicaragua-or an abusive spouse or insulting boss at work; internal, the voices in our minds that tell us we’re not smart enough, or pretty enough, or worthy for any good thing to come our way. The external tyrants use the internal tyrants-fear, low self-esteem, lack of self-confidence, the feeling of powerlessness-to control us, to make us believe they’ll never get out of our bad situation, that they’ll always have power over us, that oppression is our fate. We must challenge that every day. Here is one challenge we are facing now-the march to plutocracy in this country, and the inability of the democratic state to enforce laws for the benefit of people. Attorney-General Eric Holder has spoken of the hesitancy of the government to prosecute the big banks-such as HSBC, found to have laundered money for terrorist organizations and drug cartels. The government, he said, finds these big banks "difficult for us to prosecute" because "some of these institutions have become too large...If you bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy." SO, the federal government is afraid that if the banks were prosecuted, it would create further damage to the economy and undermine whatever recovery there is. It has come to this, that the corporations are more powerful that the civil state. The slogan is the banks are “too big to fail” so they received huge funds for bailout-cal it the WELFARE program for corporations it is!- and now they are “too big to jail” due to their power in the economy. They act like John Galt and his billionaire buddies in the Ayn Rand rag of a novel Atlas Shrugged; they go into Galt’s Gulch and the economy goes to hell until they have their way. We must either nationalize the banks, or the banks and other corporations will privatize the government, to their benefit. How far will our capitalist class go to preserve their hold on our government? At the start of the Franklin Roosevelt administration in 1933, leaders of industry and finance opposed to the New Deal-and were fans of the Fascist regimes of Germany and Italy- organized the American Liberty League, a forerunner to Americans for Prosperity; they plotted to organize a coup d'etat against FDR, using a private army of military veterans as a gun to the head of the government. The plotters, who led such conglomerates as Du Pont, Bethlehem Steel, Goodyear, and JP Morgan, contacted Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, a legendary Marine Corps officer, to lead the military force. But Butler, remembering his oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic, turned against the plotters and reported them to the McCormack-Dickstein committee of the House of Representatives-but alas, the same kid gloves with which our contemporary capitalists are treated were used on the plotters against the government back then; the committee report on the plot was suppressed, and the plotters were never prosecuted. All of this is in the book The Plots Against The President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right, by Sally Denton. It is this opposition to FDR and the New Deal that is the basis of the contemporary right-wing movement, a denial that their precious “free enterprise” failed the nation, and that the corporations’ power had to be curtailed, for THEIR good and the good of the general public. Could they try something like that again? I would NOT put it past them; they have been shown to have no morals, no sense of responsibility to the society or the public, and no scruples about keeping and maintaining their power. And what ARE the results of allowing the capitalist class to do what EVER it wants? We can see it in the tragedies of West, Texas, where chemicals in an unregulated fertilizer plant exploded, killing and injuring workers and leaving a town devastated; and in the building in Bangladesh, which held garment factories and collapsed on workers earning pocket change for an hour’s work, killing and injuring many. Tragedies like these come from the idea that corporations are always right and the government MUST follow instructions from them, or there will BE no economic prosperity. We the working and low-income people of America must continue to educate and organize ourselves to what is really going on in the country, to use our own minds and talents to defend our rights. WE are the ones who, by our work and talent, bring the economy into being, and so make the capitalists look good. WE must organize for OUR benefit, and the benefit of our children and our communities. Bye!

The Mason Missile, February 14, 2013

Greetings! We are in the middle of African-American History Month, where we honor those in the African-American community who have contributed to this country, in spite of racism and persecution. Traditionally such history has deliberately been hidden, hence a month dedicated to it; it takes its origins from the historian Carter G. Woodson and his organization, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, declaring the second week of February "Negro History Week," February being the birth month of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. I would like to bring up a couple of African-American men who I don't believe get enough press; they were fundamental in the Civil Rights and Labor movements (and there has been tremendous overlap between the two movement; they are one and the same). The first is A. (Asa) Philip Randolph, who was a Socialist of the Eugene V. Debs era, and came out against the First World War; and editor of the radical newspaper The Messenger. In 1925 a group of sleeping car porters asked Randolph to lead their union-organizing effort, for better wages and conditions from the Pullman Sleeping Car Company. The Pullman company did the usual tricks in trying to break the union, such as calling favors in Black newspapers to publish articles against the union, calling on ministers to preach against the union, hiring goons to terrorize the workers, and threatening porters with firing. But, after ten years of struggle, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) won a charter from the AFL, and a contract from the Pullman company; from that the Sleeping Car Porters became some of the most prosperous workers in the Black community. (This might not seem like much, organizing workers, but it’s basic; a person MUST have a decent livelihood to advance in life, be able to pay their utilities, their mortgages, and their kids’ way through college. Randolph, along with Dr. Martin Luther King, knew the importance of economic democracy along with political democracy; what good is having the right to go to college if you don’t have the money for it?) As the United States prepared to enter the Second World War, Randolph campaigned for a march on Washington in 1941 to advocate for the end of racial discrimination in armaments industries; President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which prohibited discrimination in defense industries. In 1947, Randolph organized a campaign of civil disobedience to end racial discrimination in the military; in1948 President Harry S. Truman, who was briefly in the Klan, signed Executive Order 9981, which ended military segregation. Another figure I salute is Bayard Rustin, who since before the Second World War, to the time of his death in 1987, was a champion activist for Civil Rights and opposition to war, pioneering nonviolent civil disobedience as a tactic for social change. Rustin endured prison for his beliefs and activism, including opposition to US participation in the Second World War, and for riding desegregated buses in the South. Randolph selected Rustin to organize the logistics of the 1963 March on Washington, with such things as organizing train and buses to take marchers to Washington, organizing press relations, and first aid stations. (It’s these unsexy, mundane, logistical things that activists work on that make social change movements work) Like Randolph, Rustin worked for a close alliance between the Civil Rights and Labor movements, understanding that economic class issues were, and remain, as important as racial issues. But-Bayard Rustin was a Gay man, in a highly homophobic era, even among otherwise progressive activists, and so had to be more in the background, as they say “taking one for the team.” I contribute to the long-overdue honoring of the life and work of Bayard Rustin. I delight at the self-destruction of the Republican party, due to its pandering to racism, sexism, and homophobia. In 2009 the “Tea Party movement” was formed by two basic organizations, Americans for Prosperity, founded by the billionaire Koch brothers, and FreedomWorks, founded by Dick Armey, who was Republican House leader. Now the Republican party has found what kind of monster it created, with Tea Party oriented candidates for President-Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, Rick Perry-displaying willful ignorance about which government agencies to eliminate, the names of former Soviet republics, and the scare of Muslims infiltrating the government. Such behavior attracted racists, people who denied provable scientific data on climate change, people who could not accept a Black man as President (“birthers”), disciples of Ayn Rand. THIS is what the Republican base has become. SO, in an effort to clean up its image, if not its act, Karl Rove, the campaign genius behind slanders that got George W. Bush elected and re-elected, organized the Conservative Victory Fund, to run candidates against the Tea Party types. They say pretty such the same thing, and it’s two sets of plutocrats-Rove and his financial backers on one side, the Koch brothers and Armey on the other-at war with each other, it’s not at all a rebels versus establishment thing. Dating back to at least Richard Nixon’s presidential campaigns, the Republican party has used racial resentment as a motivating tool to attract white voters, a strategy outlined in the book by Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority. Using phrases like “law and order’ and “welfare queen,” thus triggering racial stereotypes in white voters’ minds, Republican Presidents Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and II got elected with white Southern votes. (There were some commentators after Nixon’s death, even on NPR, that acted like Nixon’s race-baiting was a stroke of political genius, and not the disgusting playing to racial hostility and ignorance to get elected, as opposed to dealing with serious social problems and thus alleviating racial hostility.) SO, the Democratic party, at least its establishment (i.e., millionaire) wing, told itself and the public that it should not get too close to these “special interests,” unless they were really hard up for votes. The “special interests” definitely were not oil companies, or the NRA, or any other deep-pocket financial donor; after the loss of 1984, gays and lesbians were identified as the “special interest’ to shun, but, to my mind, the LGBT community was another code for all other minorities, such as African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, and the Labor movement. All of a sudden, these oppressed minority groups are now oppressors to be liberated from; and the Democratic party is just as in bed with corporations as the Republicans, and just as willing to shun the African-American community, as with Bill Clinton’s baiting of Sister Souljah. We can NOT rely on our political class, especially our “allies.” No matter-I take the LONG view of social change. Forty years ago or so, Feminism and Gay Rights were taking off as movements, and they were treated as late-night talk show jokes, when they were mentioned at all; later on they were taken seriously enough to have counter-movements against them, such as the anti-ERA campaign of Phyllis Schlafley and the anti-Gay campaign of Anita Bryant in 1977. Female and LGBT candidates ran for offices, and women and Gays entered every field imaginable. There have been roadblocks, which I see as passive-aggressive forms of resistance to these groups DARING to assert themselves-resistance to same-sex marriage, fighting the right to abortion by terrorizing women seeking them. Still, the rights of women and LGBT people have advanced to where same-sex marriage is not only morally right, but popular; and women in military service (God watch over them all!) are now entering traditionally “manly” combat specialties. Such is the result of brave and persistent work by dedicated activists who, in earlier times were told to give up and go back to their closets or kitchens, and resisted cultural conditioning by all forms of media to win. Thus, we continue the struggle, and who know WHAT the next level would be? I’ll be on the train-bye!

The Mason Missile, January 2, 2013

Greetings, everyone. I hope everyone had a great holiday season, and I wish everyone a happy and prosperous new year. I see we survived the scare of the Mayan calendar apocalypse, the idea that the world would end on December 21, 2012. People actually believed this idea, circulating among New Age circles and websites, and made such preparations as building their own arks, like Noah, and their own bunkers with food, power generators, and water filtration systems. We've been through this before, last year, with the evangelist Harold Camping predicting the end of the world on May 21st. (Always the twenty-first of the month-why?) I, on the other hand, believe in Tikkun Olam, the repair and healing of the world. The doomsday scenarios talk about the destruction of the world, and what to you should to do disengage yourself from it when it occurs; I believe in engaging the world fully, to work towards fixing what needs to be fixed, such as seeing that all workers have good jobs with good pay and benefits, and that health insurance, food, and education are provided for to all, and not treated like luxuries. In last year's Yom Kippur service, I had the honor of giving the D'var Torah on the Book of Isaiah, Chapters 57 and 58, where the Prophet condemns: Because on your fast day You see to your business And oppress your laborers! Because you fast in strife and contention And you strike with a wicked fist! And the Prophet continues: No, this is the fast I desire: To unlock the fetters of wickedness And untie the cords of the yoke To let the oppressed go free; To break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, And to take the wretched poor into your home; When you see the naked, to clothe him, And not to ignore your own kin. This is appropriate to think about, with the upcoming celebration of the life and work of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. This is a great time to perform acts of Tikkun Olam, such as helping a returning veteran write his resume so he can get a job, or helping any unemployed worker find a job, or working at a food bank passing food out to low-income people, or helping at a battered women’s shelter. You need to see what a social problem looks like-it’s not statistics or theories, it’s living, breathing people having troubles. But then you have to ask-why can’t this veteran who served his/her country, or this perfectly competent worker, find a job? Why do decent people have to ask for food in this so-called wealthy nation? Why does a man strike his wife? This is the idea of Tikkun Olam, to repair the world so that none of this happens. we must concern ourselves with the well-being of our fellow humans, and that requires being engaged in it. Religion-real, effective religion-is what we do outside the sanctuary of our house of worship. It’s how we treat the poor and oppressed, the powerless in our community, and help them find their power to change things. As Dr. King put it, “A religion true to its nature must...be concerned about man's social conditions. Religion deals with both earth and heaven, both time and eternity. Religion operates not only on the vertical plane but also on the horizontal. It seeks not only to integrate men with God but to integrate men with men and each man with himself. This means, at bottom, that the Christian gospel is a two-way road. On the one hand it seeks to change the souls of men, and thereby unite them with God; on the other hand it seeks to change the environmental conditions of men so that the soul will have a chance after it is changed. Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion. Such a religion is the kind that Marxists like to see - an opiate of the people.” (This is the Martin Luther King Jr. we have to understand, not the sanitized saint put forth by our brain-damaged media, but the man who challenged his nation, and his religion, to live up to their professed ideas.) The apocalyptic idea has played out after the presidential election, with the futile political game playing about the “fiscal cliff,” the impending disaster that would come if the House, Senate and President did not come to an agreement on spending and taxes. The goal of the “Tea Party” hard-liners would be to save millionaires and billionaires from having to pay their fair share of taxes, even though so many of the multi-billion corporations, such as Exxon-Mobil and Whirlpool have paid ZERO in taxes-and, in spite of the rightist propaganda, have NOT created any new jobs or plants in this country to hire America workers, but have treated their CEOs, no matter how incompetent they proved to be, with bonuses and raises, among many other perks. (Unfortunately, the political squabbling and horse-trading dominated the news, while the needs of the people, the effect of cuts in funding worthwhile programs and the effect on the people they help, never came up. Oh, yes, we do SO need our own people’s media.) The Republicans thought they could use the Tea Party “movement” to motivate their base and reclaim power; but the Tea Party-ites refused to go along with any compromise on the budget and the fiscal cliff, determined to make Obama look bad, even though they instead made the Congress look bad, with approval ratings lower than those of the Communist Party. They have even been plotting to remove John Boehner from the Speaker’s chair, believing that no one in far enough to the right for them. And what are the things the Tea Party crew getting steamed about? Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and funding for relief for communities devastated by Hurricane Sandy. It’s purely out of dogma that they behave this way. Yet, through gerrymandering of congressional districts by their home state legislatures, they have a safe berth in Congress, enjoying the free health care and other benefits our taxes provide for them-unless, of course, we educate ourselves and our neighbors about what goes on in the world, in Congress, and our neighborhoods; yes, we ARE our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. Again, have a safe and prosperous new year-bye!

Webcam video from December 15, 2012 2:23 PM

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!