Looking To The 1920s For Insights

We are left with entertaining icons of the 1920's that camouflage the realities that underlay the fascinating decade. Most of all those years appear frantic to us, we who live in a most frantic age.

The flapper, the mobster, the swell, the Babe, Dempsey, Lindbergh, jazz, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the birth of big time Hollywood, the sense of victory in the air, of an America no longer a frisky colt but a thoroughbred upon the world race track.

Underneath that benign anthropology, though, was a dark side of America that has never been fully repressed. The same dark side has surfaced recently under the tutelage of the extreme right wing and its marionettes in the Tea Party.

Notably, these expressions of America's dark side erupt during or immediately after times of severe stress, whether called forth by war or economic dislocation.

While many people, particularly those in big cities and industrial centers, enjoyed the boom, a huge minority were disaffected, angry and anti-everything. Real incomes fell among 70% of all Americans in the so-called Roaring Twenties.

Rural people hated Big Labor. Big Labor despised Big Capital. Big Capital hated regulation. Women were repulsed by drinking men. Protestants hated Catholics and Jews. Old line whites hated southern and eatern European immigrants. The city and country were at loggerheads as farm prices stayed depressed for years. Prices of everything were too high, or prices were too low, depending on whether you were a buyer or a seller.

In the 20's, the Ku-Klux Klan saw its revival blossom not just in the newly assertive South, but in places it is now unimaginable: Oregon, California, parts of the Mid-West, even having mobs in suburban New York and New Jersey.

New York State, which at the time had 6 Socialists in its legislature, tossed them out for being un-American. In fact, most northern and Mid-Western states had socialist members of their legislatures, all of whom were defeated or otherwise deprived of their seats in the 20's.

This was part of the anti-Bolshevik movement that was funded by business interests in order to undermine labor organizing and is commonly called the first "Red Scare." Directly under the outer skin of this conflict lay "buyer's remorse" over the nation's having fought in WWI. Nothing seemed to come of the war and soon enough the Europeans would be at each others' throats once more. So, anti-communism was really about anti-Europeanism to a large extent.

Piled into this swamp was an anti-immigration fervor that makes the goings-on in Arizona look like a cricket match. Responding to the fears of white America, Congress passed two bills in 1924. (Click link for wiki overview of these acts.) The first was the Immigration Act (or Johnson-Reed Bill) part of which was the National Origins Act, and the second, (can you imagine anything more bluntly named?), the Asian Exclusion Act. (Today's border fence, below.)

Finally, the 1920's was a time of enormous technological change, developments rivaling our own era. The automobile became available to the common person; telephone communication was perfected; talkies came into being; the rise of radio began; the phonograph replaced the player piano in homes; and big cities as well as small towns were well-lighted by electric bulbs. While airline companies fledged before WWI, it was in the 1920's that they became fixtures due to a surplus of army aviators and the planes they had flown during the war. Advanced surgery techniques also grew out of the war experience.

These advances unsettled people, especially the older generation and led to a vague anti-technology movement that expressed itself more through skepticism (the Scopes Trial in 1925) tha through direct actions such as sabotage. 

 

 History rarely provides us with direct, one-to-one comparisons. It does often provide us with parallels and examples.

The feeling of a battle between left and right today is a real feeling.

The sense of dislocation from what many people feel is fruitless war conflicts with our natural patriotism.

The decline of real income in the last decade among the lower middle, middle and even upper middle class is a fact. Until 2009, the United States had been in stasis regarding job creation since the year 2000.

The ridiculous bandying about of the term "Socialist" in critiques of the President recalls other Red Scares. (Although it hasn't and won't work this time.)

The anti-immigrant Dengue Fever gripping parts of the country now also has its clear antecedents as described above.

We know that we are in the midst of enormous technological change when we see technocrats like Steve Jobs discussing the up and downsides of the iPhone4 on the front page of the paper or as the third lead story of the evening news.

That big business sees all the disruption and dislocation as a good opportunity for them is also quite clear. Exxon Mobile and the Koch family (owners of the world's largest privately held energy company) fund right wing non-profits who in turn fund the Tea Parties. (See: The Price of Tea, NY Liberal State of Mind, Feb. 12, 2010 by clicking here.)

Business always funds anti-union, anti-environment and anti-people initiatives. Why should it be any different in 2010 than it was in the 1920's?

Income inequality is at its worst since the 1920's. And the rich still don't want to pay their fair share of taxes. That should tell you everything you need to know.
.

My Union Bona Fides

My experience as a union worker was mostly positive, although the work was grueling and the bosses on my construction sites were as demon-possessed as any bosses ever to walk the face of the planet. Time indeed was money.

I was in the local Laborers Union of the AFL-CIO. The years were 1968, '69 and '70. My primary job the first year and a half was hand-digging ditches, trenches, channels and squares, and scraping foundation holes to within 1/128th of an inch so footings and piers could be sited and poured. My secondary job was to break down the forms made up of wide planks that the concrete for the footings and piers were poured into. That lumber was then cleaned of 60d nails (think crucifixion size nails) and re-stacked for re-use. My third job was generally to clean up the various staging yards and fetch just about anything the skilled labor guys wanted at Mach 2 speed. My fourth job was to take uncensored verbal abuse as one of the "rabbits," the young, mostly college kids who held these summer jobs.

Dozens of my contemporaries held well-paying blue-collar summer jobs in those days. They worked building roads, in small steel mills, as meat cutters in slaughterhouses, in factories that made grinding wheels as big as a house and as small as an eyelash brush. Some painted houses, some put in sidewalks, some drove truck, some did tree work for the county.

Aside from playing into our romantic self-conceptions - we were all in our minds "On The Road" just like Kerouac, Neal Cassady, or even Tom Joad - we earned damned good money, money that could almost pay for a full year of college, plus spending cash, in that era.

I was part of a crew that lived in a motel that was astronaut themed. It was sweaty, nasty, back-breaking work building the Stony Brook University Campus near Port Jefferson on Long Island: dormitories, a library, and two administration buildings. But...

The "rabbits" earned - get ready - $7.14 per hour for straight time. We earned double time - $14.28 an hour for overtime, and $21.42 an hour for any time we put in before 7:30 AM and after 6 PM. Great money for an unskilled man supporting a family in those days, a king's ransom for a college kid. I averaged about $475 per week before deductions over the course of 8 to 10 weeks.

Breaks were union regulated. Twenty minutes for every two hours worked. Forty-five minutes for lunch on top of that. If you worked before 7:30 AM or after 6 PM, the construction outfit bought your meals.

The shop steward made rounds constantly on a little traffic cop scooter. If you were looking a little peaked in the July sun, he'd blow a whistle, point to you and shout out "water," and his "boy," about 14 years old, would run a big tin can of ice water to you. The steward watched you drink it, then rub the ice cubes over your neck, arms and chest. After a stopwatch-timed 5 minutes he blew the whistle, and shouted "work on." And back to work you went.

After a summer and a half of that, I was chosen to learn surveying, the assumption being that someone in college had a strong sense of geometry. What a relief! A little higher pay and almost no shoveling. I started holding the sticks (surveying rods) and eventually did the triple check, peering through the transit level and siting up the sticks after the chief surveyor-engineer had done it twice himself. All the figures had to be spot on each other through each of the three readings. One bad set of numbers and you started all over.

Transit levels - now called theodolites - are very accurate. They measure long lines in fractions of minutes of an angle. At a distance of one mile, one minute of angle covers about 1.5 feet. At a distance of one mile, one-tenth of a second of angle covers about 0.003 feet. Our buildings were 200 to 250 feet on a side, so we would be accurate to .000105 feet. Some serious measuring and squaring up. Of course this is absolutely necessary because if an angle starts slightly out of true, by the time you travel 250 feet it is wayyyyy out of true. The parallelogram effect.

The digging, scraping, trenching, and lumber cleaning gave me an animal appreciation for a 6,800 calorie a day diet. (One which, given the level of physical exertion, allowed me to lose 14 pound over the summer.)

The surveying gave me an abiding reverence for the building of the pyramids and the Roman aqueducts.

The quashing of unions in the last 30 years is a terrible, terrible thing for our country. In another generation we will know the full meaning of this almost cosmic blunder. Meanwhile,

Raise your glass to the hard working people

Let's drink to the uncounted heads

Let's think of the wavering millions

Who need leading but get gamblers instead...

      - Jagger/Richards

Virginia's Confederate History and Slavery Glorification Month Proclamation

 The Governor of Virginia's Racist Proclaimation (link)

I made a valiant effort to stop fuming and foaming over the callous, despicable political move by Bob McDonnell, Governor of Virginia. This is a direct affront to all people of color, indeed all people, in his state and our country. It is a further affront to the truly brave people who fought to preserve the Union and dismantle the repugnant institution of slavery.

I urge you to write to McDonnell and explain the revulsion we should all feel at such a proclamation. Here is the "contact the governor" page link, and here is what I wrote to this loathsome human being:

Dear Governor:

We are thinking here in New York of proclaiming a Traitorous Actions of the Confederate Fiends Month. This would include informing our local school children and others of how a group of hideously immoral people wantonly attacked their elected government, killed hundred of thousands of people needlessly - all in order to keep millions of human beings in permanent bondage. 

There is no glory in what the soldiers of the South did. Their heroism was misguided. Their memory is forever tarnished. They brought destruction and disgrace upon their homes and families fighting for an ugly, inhuman cause. You forever have associated yourself with the worst in the human spirit. I am sending today a check for $100 to the Virginia Democratic Party to help begin the process of removing you from office in the fastest legal way possible. I will also urge every acquaintance, friend and relative I have never to spend a nickel in Virginia until this racist declaration is reversed. What an awful thing for you to have done.You should be ashamed of yourself.
 ...

Coal, Death, and Unions

 We know that coal is not an unequivocal good for our country or world, the way it is mined and burned now. Nor are unions an undiluted good for either their workers or the overall economy.

Coal is with us, however, for better or worse, workers are with us, and unions are still the best way yet to be conceived to protect working people's health, safety, security and wages.

The United Mine Workers Union has squandered its patrimony by not standing up more firmly to the mining companies. Is it better to die in a pit 500 feet in the ground like trapped rats burned and gassed to death, or to stand up and organize, resist and if necessary shed blood for what is fair and right? UMW: look to your history for inspiration.

The tragedy that is unfolding in the Massey Energy Company's Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, West Virginia, dramatizes what happens at a non-union facility when the diabolical neglect of a mining company and government indifference intersect.

Upper Big Branch was fined three times in March alone because of dangerous methane and CO2 levels. Workers have to report problems to authorities anonymously because the Massey Energy Company, the largest mining company in central Appalachia, has bitterly resisted unionization and persecutes any worker who speaks out on crucial issues. Federal and state governments are reactive rather than pro-active concerning safety issues and are essentially AWOL when it comes to environmental damage until the evidence is sickeningly overwhelming. Prevention is worth - oh, a few million pounds of cure.

In 2008 Massey paid a $20 million fine to the EPA for violating water pollution permit limits at its mines and plants 4,520 times between January 2000 and December 2006. Massey had polluted and clogged hundreds of streams and rivers in Kentucky and West Virginia by releasing countless thousands of tons of metals, sediments and acid mine drainage into those states' waterways. It took 8 years from the first incident to the moment the fine was leveled.

Massey is a company hell-bent on creating environmental and human disasters. Massey CEO Don Blankenship is unapologetic: “Violations are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process,” he said. (Translation: we know there are laws but we don't care and violate them anyway because our profits are more important than people or the environment.)

Due primarily to Blankenship's efforts, only one-quarter of mine workers in Appalachian states are unionized, down from 95% less than 30 years ago. This has bred more environmental and human catastrophe at a time when, in fact, more and better safety technologies than ever before are available.

In addition, Blankenship has laid out a plot to pollute West Virginia's political process with campaign contributions that dwarf anything honest opponents can muster. When Massey lost a $50 million dollar jury award to another company that Massey had forced out of business, Blankenship set to work to dismantle plaintiff-friendly courts in West Virginia.

In 2004 Blankenship gave $3.5 million to back the successful candidacy of obscure Republican Brent Benjamin for a seat on the West Virginia Supreme Court. That's how important putting morally corrupt judges in place is to Massey. (Blankenship’s gargantuan contribution inspired the U.S. Supreme Court to order Benjamin to step down from an appeal involving Massey.)

All this in a state that consistently ranks 48th or 49th in per capita GDP nationally. (Per capita income for all West Virginians is around $30K. Blankenship's personal income is approximately $34 million per year, 1100 times larger than the average. Is it any wonder he's padding the pockets of friendly, right wing politicians?)

Do you hear that desperate sound coming from underground? It's the extremist right leaning madness that's taken a deat hold on one of our poorest states, which happens also to be our most environmentally damaged state.

The United Mine Workers Union needs to look to its militant roots and stop serving as the facilitator for Blankenship and others like him. The UMW membership needs to stop sitting on their hands and raise their fists in the air.
...

The China Recall Syndrome

As China warns the United States that America has more to lose in a "trade war," we are left scratching our heads. Last year we were in the trade hole with China to the tune of $227 billion, better than 2008's $268 billion deficit, but no reason to send in the brass bands. (That's almost a half a trillion deficit in two years.)

What is more insulting is that often the products that China sends our way are not just poorly made, but downright dangerous. The Fisher-Price lead-painted toys recall cost that company between $40 and $70 million. If you think that kind of hit made China's manufacturers sit up and take notice, you're mistaken.

In the last month or so, everything from children's bicycle bells with lead paint to power packs that can burst into flame and explode, to kids hoodies with dangerous drawstrings around the neck to remote controls for gas-heated fireplaces and hockey sticks have been  recalled. (By no means should these be compared to the massive recall of Toyota products, but the response of Toyota - weak in spirit, but concrete in action - should be compared to the companies from China, which has no response except for the recalls. There were also salmonella precipitated recalls of food here recently.)

The biggest culprit in China is the incredibly low net profit margin on goods produced there. It runs in the range of 1 to 2%. Developed countries run around 6 to 9%.

This is part of a grand scheme to capture ever larger shares of markets and amounts to legalized dumping. Couple that with the manipulation of China's currency, the yuan, and we have a prescription for conflict. Toss in the impossibly low wage scales in China and the perfect import-export storm has developed.

This is a liberal cause because for decades now, through Democratic and Republican administrations, the expression Free Trade has been bandied about as if the universal panacea. Simultaneously, unions have been denigrated and demonized by economists from slightly left of center to the far right. Only truly leftist economists have completely understood and explained the value of unions.

Germany, which is second now to China in total manufacturing exports - having just slipped from first place - is about 34% unionized in its industrial sector. The United States runs about 12%. So, the issue isn't unions and efficiency.

Additionally, unions prevent under-priced, shoddily-made goods from entering the country they operate in. Multinationals with the assistance of their minions in government relentlessly persecute unions. Yet, consistently, right to work states, mostly in the American South, have consistently lower wages and purchase a higher proportion of goods from countries like China. Why are we racing to the bottom?

Right to work? How about right to compete on an equal footing? How about the right to a decent wage and legitimate benefits? Our governments have sold out our manufacturing workers.

This, in spite of the fact that American factories are the most efficient in the world along with Japan's and Germany's.

Related posts:

http://nyliberalstateofmind.blogspot.com/2010/03/cutting-trade-imbalance-with-china-in.html

http://nyliberalstateofmind.blogspot.com/2010/03/counterfeit-country-and-american-jobs.html
...

Where Is The Health Coverage Of Yesteryear?

I want to add a personal coda to the madness we've witnessed in the last 14 months that culminated in the spitting, the racist and anti-Gay epithets, and the rocks flying through the windows of Democrats.

The year was 1970, 40 years gone now, and I was in college. Throughout that summer I worked a unionized construction job digging ditches, tearing apart concrete forms for huge skyscrapers and stacking and re-stacking lumber and other supplies.

My father had died the previous summer. Because I was a full-time college student, I was automatically enrolled in a plan for medical coverage under Medicare/Medicaid due to his death. (Coverage #1)

I also remained on our family health insurance, because I was still in college, a matter of a couple of dollars a month. (Coverage #2)

Additionally, like most colleges, mine folded health coverage into the usual tuition and fees. (Coverage #3)

In order to join the laborers local brotherhood for my summer job, I had to pay a very small portion of yet another health insurance plan. I believe my share was 15% of my overall plan cost, which came to less than 50 cents per week. I can't remember the exact percentage, but it was painless. I had to maintain the payments the whole year long if I wanted to work the following summer, which I did. (Coverage #4)

I never used one jot of the insurance, even though the union plan allowed for two free extensive check ups through their chosen network. The paperwork was a bit onerous, I was an impatient adolescent, and besides, my own family doctor charged a measly $7.50 for the mandatory back-to-school physical, a 15-minute once over with a couple of shots. (Prices from the New York metropolitan area.) It was much simpler to take it out of my own earnings in order to go to the doctor I had grown up with and liked very much.

I know there are some, especially the young, who might want to paint me as a "golden-ager," living an American version of "La vie en rose." I'm really not. Looking back, there are many things from that era that were demeaning and completely irrational. And I was a white middle class male, so you can imagine what others were enduring.

Health care was not one of those things that was completely irrational. I'm not just outraged, I'm consistently surprised at what has gone on with health care costs over four to four and a half decades.

Since 1965, real wages have gone up about 40% in the United States. Some things cost a lot more, but most things have remained quite stable. For instance, gasoline in 1965 was approximately $2.15 per gallon in constant dollar terms. In November of 2009 it was $2.61, a real rise of 22%. A loaf of bread cost about 39 cents, whereas now it costs about $1.49. (Stop thinking high end baguettes and boules!)

Health care has risen from 7.2% of GDP in 1965 to over 18% of GDP today, and it is projected to be 20 to 22% of GDP just 5 years from now.

Like most of us, I don't know how wonderful the Democratic Party's reform will be. I do know that when I look at the arc of my own life and those of my contemporaries vis a vis the old days and today, health care looks pretty good back then.

Was medical treatment as thorough? No, of course not. Innumerable advances have been made. Was it equitably distributed? No, it was not, but it isn't now and probably won't be in the future, either.

Is it worth 22% of our national income to get us to 85 or 90 instead of 77? 

Perhaps. Ask me when I'm 77. 


..

The Counterfeit Country and American Jobs

See "My Home Town Video" at end of post.

Aside from its unapologetic manipulation of its currency, Dark Ages-style wages and working conditions, and import tariffs that make it impossible for any country to have a reasonably balanced trade relationship with it, China is the epicenter of the production counterfeit products.

Indeed, China is the producer of 86% of all counterfeit products in the world.

$500,000's worth of (American company designed and licensed) Chinese-made knock off shoes found their way to Budapest last week.

Illegal American faux-label vodka with 120 times the normal amount of ethanol was marketed in Great Britain in 2009, causing 4 deaths.

The FDA of Nigeria in conjunction with 7 other African countries' enforcement agencies in 2009 seized a large consignment of counterfeit anti-malarial generic medicines with “Made in India” and "Made in USA" labels and later found that the fake drugs had in fact been produced in China. (There is a colder current involved in this one - the drugs are purposely made to be below acceptable standards in order to undermine India's drug market share in Africa.)

$3 billion worth of fake movie DVDs, based on the intellectual property of American studios, were distributed worldwide by Chinese counterfeiters in 2008. The figure is expected to leap by another half billion in 2009. 

Worse still, from the point of view of U.S. companies, is the fact that 80% of all software used on computers in China is counterfeit or illegally copied. (Amazingly, this is down from 90% in 2004.)

A United States patented rolled metal process for the making of fine filaments used in the making of circuitry boards in all kinds of electronics products is used freely in China in spite of the fact that companies from 12 other countries pay their fair share of licensing costs. This costs the American companies of the jointly-owned patents over $27 million per year in lost fees.

The Re-innovation Of Innovation

To add insult and further injury to the damage already stemming from this counterfeiting, China is promoting something they call "indigenous innovation." Sounds benign enough, doesn't it?

But the devilish detail is that the new law, Order 613, mandates that in order for foreign intellectual property (IP) to be put on a government procurement list, the IP must be developed, or owned and trademarked by a Chinese company or government agency.

Foreign Affairs Ministry Spokeswoman Jiang Yu said this:

China’s indigenous innovation includes original innovation and integrated innovation as well as the re-innovation of innovation that is introduced, digested, and absorbed. Indigenous innovation activities are open, and come from within enterprises. The indicators for accrediting indigenous innovation products are not based on the nature of the enterprise, but on whether the enterprise carries out innovative activity and gains products that have indigenous intellectual property rights.

Essentially, "re-innovation of innovation" means stealing.

Every software developer, content provider, film and music publisher in the rest of the world is against this. However, so far, national governments seem to be particularly disinterested.

It's time for the Obama Administration to step up and put real teeth into sanctions on China. American jobs, which are in notorious short supply these days, are being stolen.

While unions in the U.S. aren't free of sin, in prior generations they served as the front line in the battle against unfair trade practices by underhanded competitors.

Jobs mean everything to unions. And jobs mean prosperity. Having a skilled workforce does us not one iota of good if it can't work because of what amounts to piracy by an unfriendly government.

By gutting the unions and battling against active re-unionization, or by permitting "right-to-work" laws in many (mostly Southern) states, conservatives in the United States have taken the union foot soldiers away from this battlefront.

Now we reap the consequences of past right wing deeds.