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"I am part of all that I have met." --Somebody
“What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.” --Investor Warren Buffet.
I'd like to think I'm writing something that will help my brothers and sisters understand our situation and the way forward. It's more likely that potential readers will like the ideas that they already agree with and skip over anything that doesn't conform with their current mind set. That's just the way all of us are. For the most part, we flatter ourselves when we imagine that we have independently come up with ideas. Most of what we do is react to situations that are forced on us.
It makes sense, then, to take a quick look at the period I live in before I start giving myself credit for originality.
I was born just before World War II. My mother raised four of us through the deprivations on the home front. I remember Roosevelt's death and the end of the war because my hometown, Ada, Oklahoma, set off the tornado sirens on both occasions. Mostly, we depended on my grandfather for subsistence. He told us to move to his farm at the end of the war and we did. Mother worked the farm as much as she could, then started cleaning people's houses in town as soon as she could afford a car. When I was 10, she got a janitor job in Oklahoma City, so we lived there 3 years, then we moved to another farm outside Ada. I usually worked alongside Mother, but I picked up a few odd jobs for spending money. At 14, I got a regular job in a movie theater in town. At 15, I started spending summers in the oil fields of the Texas Panhandle. When work got scarce, I joined the Navy. But that's just what I was doing, what was going on in the world?
The United States won World War II and scooped up the spoils of war. Most of the productive capacity of the rest of the world had been bombed flat. American cars weren't just the best cars made, they were the only cars! Previously mighty nations were recycling tin cans to make tiny doo-dads. "Made in Japan" was a common joke about shabby work. "Made in Germany" didn't even exist! America had almost all the gold in the world, and everybody else carried debts to America. Gold and U.S. dollars were almost the only currencies with any credibility.
Big money in America had almost no problems, except for the victorious Soviet Union and their own U.S. workers. The American working class was a lusty one. They, too, had won World War II, and they were ready for a payoff. The year 1946 saw more strikes, and more working hours lost to strikes, than any year in American history. Unions were on the rise and wages and benefits were going up.
In order to tame the working class, the bosses had a four-pronged strategy:
Churchill, with President Truman in attendance, gave his "Iron Curtain" speech in 1946. Almost immediately, all information sources in America joined the red-baiting campaign. Communist leaders were arrested and imprisoned. The FBI started "visiting" workplaces to assure the firing of anybody even suspected of civil rights or leftward thinking. In 1947, over Truman's veto, the Republican Congress passed the anti-union Taft Hartley law which, among other things, led to the expulsion of the socialists and communists in the labor movement.
In what is sometimes called the "Treaty of Detroit," which was actually several union negotiations, top capitalists convinced labor leaders to take company pensions instead of strengthening Social Security and company insurance programs instead of national health care. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's ghostwritten anticommunist books were very popular and everything ever written by anticommunist stool pigeons was made into a feature-length movie or a long-running television series. By 1957, there were practically no known leftists in American society and the unions were in a downward spiral. I was graduating high school.
They called it "The American Century" and it clearly lasted until 1972.
During the Nixon Administration, the U.S. stopped underwriting the price of gold with dollars because the other industrialilzed nations were back in action. Volkswagons, Fiats, and Nissan automobiles were becoming common on American streets. The United States continued its military domination of the world, but its cultural and economic hegemony was on the wane and still is in 2015.
Every capitalist enterprise has to sell more than it buys. That means that there are losers for every winner. The same is true at the international level. American corporations have to sell more stuff to somebody else than they buy. After the other industrialized nations regained their feet, the fight was on for economic domination. In my opinion, U.S. bosses didn't fully grasp the new situation until 1980. After they elected Ronald Reagan, they knew exactly what to do -- aggressively suppress workers at home and abroad. They had a tremendous success when the markets of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union fell into their grasp. The U.S. economy soared in the 1990s, but the rules of international competition re-asserted themselves soon afterward.
The rules of international competition have to do with production costs. Production costs are primarily labor costs. In other words, the "winner" of the new international competition, also known as the "race to the bottom," is the nation that can cut the living standards of its workers most successfully. So far, the U.S. is winning, that is the U.S. bosses are winning. The rest of us are losing.
As has been the case throughout American history, African Americans, working almost alone, provided the leadership in the fight for social improvement. The NAACP got school desegregation declared illegal in 1954. By 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King was leading the national fight for social justice. In 1968, just before they killed him, he emphatically joined the anti-war movement.
The so-called "New Left" developed because of the upsurge in the civil rights and anti-war movements. The long-time connection between these struggles and their ideological leaders had been destroyed during the red-baiting "McCarthy" period. The new radicals had virtually no experience at anything, and practically no idea of what to do. Consequently, we went back through every mistake that had ever been made. The Hippies thought they had invented utopian socialism, which was tried and thoroughly discredited centuries ago. Slowly, though, two steps ahead and one step back, progressives in America began to find their way.
The American labor movement, the organized section of the working class, was isolated from the upsurge until 1995 when, for the first time in a century, their chain of leadership was disrupted. The AFL-CIO elected John Sweeney, Richard Trumpka, and Linda Chavez-Thompson instead of the hand-picked chosen successors. They began a long process of successfully re-assimilating themselves with their natural allies in the working class. That's where we find ourselves in 2015.
Through this incredible period of U.S. domination and slow decline, we had what we thought were our own ideas.
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