http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/07/honduran-coup-damning-indictment-of-capitalism/
Honduran Coup: Damning Indictment of Capitalism
by Dennis Rahkonen
Dissident Voice: July 10, 2009
Since he's spending his summer vacation at our home, I recently washed my
11-year-old grandson's dirty clothes.
As I later folded them, small tags told me they were manufactured in the
Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, and Honduras.
Not one item bore a "Made in USA" label, which is very sad, considering that
the unionized needle trades were once a bastion of our country's labor
movement, and that finding attire produced overseas was a rarity just a few
decades ago.
All this relates closely to the despicable coup that deposed Honduras'
democratically elected president, Manuel Zaleya.
Although the coup's initiators say they were motivated by other factors,
what really spurred their reactionary ire was Zaleya promoting better pay
and conditions for Honduran workers in general, but particularly for the
virtual sweatshop slaves whose cruel exploitation by mostly U.S. garment
firms has been an utterly obscene profit generator for shameless owners
residing in luxury in the North.
It would be extremely naive to think those "foreign" companies, along with
others involved in banana and fruit growing, did not facilitate the coup in
more than minor ways. It goes without saying, also, that U.S. political
conservatives, with operative ties to covert Central American intrigues
dating back to the Reagan years, are now malevolently present in
Tegucigalpa.
Our nation's anti-democratic, imperialist role in Central America is nothing
new.
Countless religious activists, teachers, clinic workers, union organizers,
and ordinary campesinos were brutalized by sordid contras secretly armed and
trained by the U.S. under illegal Reagan administration aegis during the '80s.
Much earlier, however, Yankee pillage of Latin America (as well as other
world locales) was already standard operating procedure, as starkly exposed
by former Marine Corps Commandant Smedley Butler:
I spent 33 years (in the Marines)…most of my time being a high-class muscle
man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a
racketeer, a gangster for capitalism…
I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown
Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for
American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic
for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a
decent place for the National City (Bank) boys to collect revenues in. I
helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the
benefit of Wall Street…
In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way
unmolested. I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals,
promotions. I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do
was operate in three city districts. The Marines operated on three
continents.
Progressives familiar with people's history know about the titanic struggle
it took to unionize U.S. labor, lifting largely immigrant masses out of deep
poverty, winning them the pay, benefits, and conditions that would shape the
contours of our storied "good life".
They know, too, that the most militant unions were purged and broken during
the McCarthyite Red Scare, allowing class-collaborationist tendencies to
rise, making the decimation of American labor in the aftermath of Reagan's
firing of the air traffic controllers essentially a cake walk, much to the
profitable delight of corporate parasites.
Now our working class — the backbone of society and the creator of all
productive wealth — is losing its jobs, homes, health care, pensions, and
collective temper on an unprecedented scale.
The savagely exploitative, intensely destructive Walmart labor relations
model dominates U.S. life, and everything we buy is produced abroad in
oppressive settings where women and children toil long hours for mere
pennies. We (and certainly they) are being ground into the dust as a tiny
minority of private "entrepreneurs" live high on the hog, via stolen wealth
that properly should be used to improve everyone's living standards.
But capitalism can't do that.
It's unable to function in anything but an increasingly rapacious way,
shafting majority wage earners ever more painfully, whether through the
acute injustice that leaves evicted families on the street in U.S. cities,
or Hondurans fearfully facing military repression and a drastic
deterioration of their already desperate existence.
As its growing resort to super-exploitation, dictatorial harshness, violence
and war clearly proves, capitalism is the intrinsic enemy — not the
ballyhooed champion — of fair play, democracy, simple decency, and peace.
Humanity will have no future worth aspiring to if it stays tied to
capitalism's irreparable flaws and fiercely down-pulling restraints. The
rest of this pivotal century clearly must be devoted to building truly
democratic, broadly uplifting socialism on a global scale.
It's the great moral imperative of our era.
Dennis Rahkonen, from Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive
commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the '60s.
Read other articles by Dennis, or visit Dennis's website.
***
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/us/28county.html?ref=us
In Tennessee Corner, Stimulus Meets New Deal
By MICHAEL COOPER
NY Times: July 27, 2009
LINDEN, Tenn. - Critics elsewhere may be questioning how many jobs the
stimulus program has created, but here in central Tennessee, hundreds of
workers are again drawing paychecks after many months out of work, thanks to
a novel use of federal stimulus money by state officials.
Here in one of Tennessee's hardest-hit areas, some workers were cutting down
pine trees with chainsaws and clearing undergrowth on a recent morning, just
past the auto parts factory that laid them off last year when it moved to
Mexico. Others were taking applications for unemployment benefits at the
very center where they themselves had applied not long ago. A few were
making turnovers at the Armstrong Pie Company ("The South's Finest Since
1946").
The state decided to spend some of its money to try to reduce unemployment
by up to 40 percent here in Perry County, a rural county of 7,600 people, 90
miles southwest of Nashville where the unemployment rate had risen to above
25 percent after its biggest plant, the auto parts factory, closed.
Rather than waiting for big projects to be planned and awarded to
construction companies, or for tax cuts to trickle through the economy,
state officials hit upon a New Deal model of trying to put people directly
to work as quickly as possible.
They are using welfare money from the stimulus package to subsidize 300 new
jobs across Perry County, with employers ranging from the state
Transportation Department to the milkshake place near the high school.
As a result, the June unemployment rate, which does not yet include all the
new jobs, dropped to 22.1 percent.
"If I could have done a W.P.A. out there, I would have done a W.P.A. out
there," said Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, a Democrat, referring to the
Works Progress Administration, which employed millions during the Great
Depression.
"I really think the president is trying to do the right thing with the
stimulus," Mr. Bredesen said, "but so much of that stuff is kind of
stratospheric. When you've got 27 percent unemployment, that is a
full-fledged depression down in Perry County, and let's just see if we can't
figure out how to do something that's just much more on the ground and
direct, that actually gets people jobs."
Tennessee is planning to pay for most of the new jobs, which it expects will
cost $3 million to $5 million, with part of its share of $5 billion that was
included in the stimulus for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
program, the main cash welfare program for families with children. The state
did not wait for the federal paperwork to clear before putting residents of
Perry County back to work.
Other states are still drawing up plans for spending the welfare money,
which is typically used for items like cash grants for families and job
training. Some are likely to use part of it to subsidize employment, as
Tennessee is doing, but it is hard to imagine many other places where the
creation of so few jobs could have such an immediate and outsize impact as
it did in this bucolic county.
A stimulus job came just in time for Frank Smith, 41, whose family was
facing eviction after he lost his job as a long-haul truck driver. Then he
landed a job with the Transportation Department.
"The day I came from my interview here, I was sitting in the court up here
where I was being evicted," Mr. Smith said after a sweaty morning clearing
trees under a hot sun to make room for new electric poles. "Luckily I'm
still in the same place. There's a lot of people that were totally
displaced."
Scott and Allison Kimble married after meeting on the assembly line at the
Fisher & Company auto parts plant. When the factory closed last year and
relocated to Mexico, the Kimbles, along with many of their friends and
neighbors, found themselves out of work. Now Mr. Kimble has a stimulus job
working for the Transportation Department, and Ms. Kimble has one in what
has become a growth industry, taking telephone applications for unemployment
benefits.
"I know what they feel like," she said between calls. "I've been in their
position."
Michael B. Smith, 53, who drove a forklift at the plant for 31 years, now
drives a Caterpillar to clear land for a developer. Robert Mackin, 55, who
lost his job, his health insurance and his home, now has a job with the
Transportation Department, a rental home, health insurance and an added
benefit: the state employee discount when his daughter goes to a state
college.
"With a degree, she can always go somewhere," Mr. Mackin said.
The impact has been enormous, all across the county. Even the look of the
place is changing, following the old W.P.A. model. In addition to the jobs
for adults, there are 150 summer jobs for young people, some of whom have
been working with resident artists to paint murals depicting local history
on the buildings along Main Street in Linden, the county seat.
Over all, two-thirds of the new jobs are in private sector businesses, which
are reimbursed by the state for the salaries of eligible stimulus workers.
Some, in retail, might be hard to sustain when the stimulus money runs out
in September 2010. Other businesses say the free labor will help them
expand, hopefully enough to keep a bigger work force.
The Commodore Hotel Linden, a newly restored 1939 hotel that has brought new
life to downtown, has seen an increase in its bookings since it has expanded
its staff thanks to the stimulus. And the Armstrong Pie Company expects to
be able to keep on the new bakery assistants and drivers it hired with
stimulus money, saying the new workers have helped the company triple its
pie production and expand its reach through central Tennessee.
The county mayor, John Carroll, has been working to lure new industry to the
area. Walking through the cavernous, empty Fisher plant, Mr. Carroll pointed
to a forgotten display case filled with dozens of awards for safety and
manufacturing excellence. "What we can offer," he said, "is a great work
force."
Mr. Kimble said the new jobs had given him and his wife paychecks, health
insurance and a reason to get up each morning. But he said he hoped that a
big, long-term employer would move in soon.
"This job here is not a permanent fix," he said. "We still need some kind of
industry to look and come into Perry County. But for right now we've got
hope, and when you've got hope, you've got a way."
No comments:
Post a Comment