Friday, September 23, 2022

Hypocrisy--from Joe Biden to Starbucks' Howard Schultz--is alive and well in the United States

(Martyred labor organizer, troubadour and immigrant Joe Hill)
 

American hypocrisy was one of my German-born mother’s first discoveries of the United States when she arrived with my U.S. Army-veteran father in 1948.  Into the welcoming arms of the Statue of Liberty she came only to find intense discrimination and resentment against immigrants like herself, particularly Germans after a war that had devastated her land and people as well as most of Europe.

 

No matter that she herself had been imprisoned by the Gestapo for her efforts to make lives easier for French prisoners at a camp in La Rochelle, France, where she had been sent by the German government to work. When she arrived in my father’s native South, first in Georgia then North Carolina, she heard a lot about “Southern hospitality” but then witnessed a racism that at times could be as raw and deadly as the racism of the Nazis in Germany.

 

For all its ideals of liberty and equality, the United States remains a nation where hypocrisy continues to reign—certainly at the highest levels of business and government, including Joe Biden.

 

My former University of Mississippi student Jaz Brisack, a Rhodes scholar, was fired in recent days from her job as a barista at Starbucks in Buffalo, New York. The firing was not a complete surprise given the fact she led the successful unionization effort at her shop, an effort that subsequently spread to Starbucks coffee shops around the country and won her nationwide attention as a leading new force in grassroots organizing.


(To the right, Jaz Brisack)

 

An expected firing perhaps, but still it hurt. “I will admit to mourning more than (legendary martyred union leader, troubadour and immigrant) Joe Hill might have approved of,” she told me, adding, however, “the union rolls on!”

 

Starbucks chief Howard Schultz and his team may offer a litany of excuses for their firings—they recently fired a union organizing barista here in my town of Oxford, Mississippi, and notoriously fired pro-union workers in Memphis—but their real reason is they want to purge their shops of pro-union workers.

 

The hypocrisy is that Starbucks has always marketed itself as a cool place to work—hip and youthful and in tune with modern, egalitarian values. Wrong. It’s a union-busting outfit on a par with Walmart.

 

Labor South has been reporting on the war in Ukraine extensively in recent months.  It’s an issue that threatens the entire world, one that pits old Western colonial powers against the Global South as well as against Russia.

 

The proxy war that NATO and the United States are waging against Russia has been planned by the Deep State in Washington, D.C., for years, and its purpose is to destroy the Russian federation and its challenge to U.S. hegemony, a first step in a broader effort that also targets China.

 

You’d think mainstream journalists would at least acknowledge or at least explore this in their coverage, but they’re so imprisoned by the worldview of their corporate owners that real reporting is impossible outside of independent media. The result is an hypocrisy that would be laughable if it weren’t so serious.

 

When Russian leader Vladimir Putin recently announced a partial military mobilization in his country, mainstream media—from the New York Times to BBC and the major U.S. television networks—rushed to report on protests by Russians against Putin’s move.

 

The scale of those protests is likely much more limited than what is being reported, and certainly less than the 70,000 protesters in the Czech Republic earlier this month who called for an end to the proxy war with its devastating economic impact on their lives. You’d never know there was such a protest in the Czech Republic if you didn’t go to YouTube or some other source for independent reportage. The same is true of similar nationwide protests in the United States in recent weeks.

 

Remember the myriad reports of shelling near the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in the Ukraine, and the mainstream reports about both Russia and Ukraine charging each other with firing those shells. The answer would come, we were told, once international inspectors arrived to assess the safety of the plant. Well, those inspectors came and not a single mainstream report followed as to which side fired those shells.

 

Wanna know why? It is because the Ukrainians were firing those shells. Of course, they did. Why would Russians fire at a nuclear plant that they already occupy?

 

Phillip Knightly’s 1975 book The First Casualty is considered the classic account of the history of war correspondence. It’s a sad history of more often bad rather than good reporting.  It’s not just because of the “fog of war”. A prime example is coverage of the Spanish Civil War in the mid-1930s. Many of the reporters there were so enamored of the leftist Spanish Republicans and full of hatred for Generalissimo Franco’s fascist army that they failed to report the brutal murders of thousands of Catholic priests and nuns across the land by the Republicans. Every outrage by Franco’s fascists, however, was dutifully reported.

 

My late mother, Maria Stoller, bless her very religious heart, knew Hitler and the Nazis could be as hypocritical as anyone with all their talk of love for the Vaterland. And she grew to love the people in her new homeland.

 

Well, maybe not all of them. It’s hard to love hypocrisy. In fact, you can’t. Even hypocrites don’t.

 


Sunday, September 4, 2022

A rising consciousness about the Neoliberal Order that dominates the world economy and how it serves the corporate rich and its handpicked politicians but impoverishes everyone else

 

(For the second year in a row, I was asked by the Unitarian Church of Oxford, Mississippi, to give a Labor Day speech, the draft of which I copied below. My topic: Neoliberalism and its effects on working class people

 

An International Perspective on Labor Day

 

From Joseph B. Atkins to the Unitarian Church of Oxford

Sunday, September 4, 2022:

 

It is a pleasure speaking to you again this Sunday just before Labor Day. When I spoke to you last time, I focused on our labor history and traditions in the United States and the religious underpinnings that thread throughout that history.

 

Today I’m going to look at labor from an international perspective, something very important today in view of the interconnectedness of our modern world in nearly every aspect of our lives.

 

We live in a world that today is dominated by a NEOLIBERAL ORDER. What is NEOLIBERALISM? It has nothing whatsoever to do with liberalism or conservatism. What it refers to is an economic philosophy that promotes the following (borrowing here somewhat from the writings of Enrico Tortolano):

 

-       FREE TRADE with as few impediments as possible

 

-       Free movement of CAPITAL across borders

 

 

-       A belief in AUSTERITY as the best path toward economic stability. Witness the EU’s demands of Greece and other countries when they experienced economic difficulty in recent years.

 

-       PRIVATIZATION of public space and services and reduction or ELIMINATION of the WELFARE STATE and its safety net programs

 

 

-       LOW PAY and benefits for workers and RESTRICTIONS on LABOR UNIONS

 

Who is the PRIME MOVER of NEOLIBERALISM in the world today? The UNITED STATES and its surrogate institutions: THE WORLD BANK, INTERNATIOAL MONETARY FUND, THE EUROPEAN UNION, and even NATO, ostensibly a defense military organization but one that has waged aggressive offensive military campaigns in Serbia, Libya, and Syria, and whose expansion since the fall of the Soviet Union led to the current war in Ukraine, a proxy war for the U.S. that ultimately is being waged to preserve a unipolar world of Western dominance unchallenged by Russia or China.

 

(To the right, Bill Clinton)


The cause of neoliberalism rose as a philosophy in the graduate demise of the New Deal era of Franklin D. Roosevelt and aftermath of World War II, the splintering and unraveling of the Democratic Party that began in the 1960s and that reached its nadir under the Clinton Administration, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s that led to an arrogant assumption of the subsequent dominance of GLOBAL CAPITALISM. Much of this history is detailed in the just published book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle.

 

Trade treaties like NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) are essentially neoliberal vehicles to legalize a globalization of free-moving capital that enriches powerful corporations and their friendly politicians but which have had the effect of uprooting millions of workers and small farmers, forcing a mass migration across borders around the world in search of work and sustenance.

 

I wrote about this in my book The Strangers Among Us: Tales of a Global Migrant Worker Movement in 2016. A collection of essays by writers from around the world, including me, the book details lived lives among the world’s 200 million migrant workers, 40 million of whom are undocumented, and most of whom live marginal lives of bare existence in an economy that has awarded untold riches to a few.

 

What the book also details, however, are the efforts of organizations and individuals around the world to give voices to those migrant workers, to work to uphold their rights as human beings. They have had some remarkable successes along the way. Many of these organizations are religious. They include:

 

-       the Asia Floor Wage Alliance in various countries of Asia

 

-       the Alliance of Progressive Workers in the Philippines

 

 

-       the Vietnamese Migrant Workers & Brides Office in Taiwan, run by a Maryknoll priest and also serving Vietnamese wives of Taiwanese men who are essentially sex slaves

 

-       the Migrant Empowerment Network (MENT) of Taiwan

 

 

-       the Mission for Migrant Workers in Hong Kong

 

-       Transient Workers Count Too in Singapore

 

 

-       And in the United States, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), National Farm Workers, United Farm Workers, and the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) union.

 

In researching this book, I traveled around the world from Hong Kong to Singapore and Taiwan, to Buenos Aires, Argentina. These workers are their organizations are up against powerful forces, but, as Gerstle’s book details, the neoliberal world order those forces represent is beginning to crumble.

 

(Bernie Sanders during a labor rally in Clinton, Mississippi)

 

The rise of Bernie Sanders on the Left and even Donald Trump on the Right is a sign of the deep disaffection within the American public with things as they are. So are Black Lives Matter and even the Tea Party. The BREXIT vote by the British people to exit the EU has more to do with that same disgruntlement than it does with an inherent racism or narrow-mindedness.  The rise of the above-mentioned organizations and the remarkable successes they’ve achieved in many cases indicate that neoliberalism’s days may be numbered.

 

Mainstream media, lapdogs rather than watchdogs mostly, essentially carry the water for NEOLIBERALISM, echoing its ideas and beliefs, the policies of its politicians and governments. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the coverage of the war in Ukraine. This tragic war could have been prevented had NATO not broken its promise to not expand to Russia’s very borders.  Then there was the 2014 coup that ousted a democratically elected leader and put Western-looking leaders in power, the betrayal of the Minsk agreement, the threats to the Russian-speaking people of the Donbas. I’m not giving a pass to Russia or Vladimir Putin in this horrible war. However, the truth is Ukraine’s ZELENSKY is a puppet of the neoliberal order. If he weren’t, then why did he recently sign a law that essentially guts worker rights in Ukraine, all in the name of, and I quote, “raising the competitiveness of employers.”

According to OpenDemocracy, “The new law significantly curtails employees’ rights (on working hours, working conditions, dismissal and compensation after dismissal) and increases employers’ leverage over their workforce. … Employers can require employees to do other work not covered by their contract if it is necessary for defence purposes, as long as this work is not detrimental to their health. … One of the most controversial provisions of the bill concerns the ability to involve women in physically strenuous labour and work underground (in mines, for example), which is currently prohibited by Ukraine’s labour laws.“

Where is the push for a negotiated peace in Ukraine? Where is there diplomacy? There is none because the proxy war ultimately has nothing to do with Ukraine. It is about markets, the free flow of capital from the West without interference or competition from Russia and above all China, the reason for the recent and needless saberrattling over Taiwan.

 

Constant war, by the way, is another by-product of neoliberalism. Just consider the 20-year war in Afghanistan, a length of wartime unprecedented in previous U.S. history. War feeds the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about a half-century or more ago.

 

However, again let me say there is a growing awareness, a consciousness, about this neoliberal order, how it serves the wealthy and corporate bottom line but little else. Witness the recent protests in Prague against the Western-and-NATO-dominated leadership of that country. An estimated 70,000 people in the streets protested. A new order is bound to emerge, and it is one that Wall Street and the EU are not going to like at all.

 

Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today.

 

Joseph B. Atkins