Racism and white dominance in politics once again dominated and are still in control of much of Southern politics almost 150 years after the Civil War ended, proving the prescience of Thaddeus Stevens when he stated that Reconstruction must "revolutionize Southern institutions, habits, and manners"The foundations of their institutions"must be broken up and relaid, or all our blood and treasure have been spent in vain." Gerrymandering, denying voting rights to felons after they have served their sentence, while increasing the incarceration rate for minorities and the poor, and ballot box shenanigans, have taken over for lynching, literacy tests, and poll taxes, but the result is the same: Jim Crow is being resurrected today in the United States, and the Civil Rights of minorities and the poor are being disregarded in the name of the Wars on Drugs and Terror. (See "The Civil Rights Movement," later in this article this article.)
The American Labor Movement and Our Middle Class
The American Labor Movement is based upon the ideas that: 1) An honest day's labor deserves a level of pay and benefits that will provide the worker and their family a reasonable standard of living without having to work vast amounts of overtime or two jobs; 2) that workers deserve a safe and non-threatening work environment; 3) that human beings should work to live, not live to work. It's method of achieving these goals was through protests, strikes, and even occasionally, violence. But most of the violence is labor disputes were instigated by the owners, their agents, or the government doing the owner's bidding.
In several of my previous articles (T he Daft-Heartless Act, The Communist Takeover of America, I Am Spartacus!, We Need to Reclaim the Spirit of America's First May Day, and Fight and Strike Anew for Economic Justice!, Mayday! Mayday!, and several others), I have written of labor's struggle against the owners, who in many cases desired not workers, but compliant slaves who would do their bidding purely out of necessity. What the Lord Chancellor of England, writing the decision for the House of Lords (then Great Britain's Supreme Court), stated in the case of Vernon v. Bethell, Eden 2, 113, (1762), is as true now as it was then [amplifications in brackets]: "Necessitous men are not, truly speaking, free men: but to answer a present emergency, will submit to any terms the crafty [and powerful--RJG] may impose upon them." This is as true today as it was two hundred-and-fifty years ago, yet the plutocratic oligarchs refuse to recognize the rights of their fellow citizens when it interferes with their ability to make ever greater profits. As I, and many others, have asked before: How much is enough? And the answer is, for these avaricious children of Mammon, there is no such thing as enough.
Michael Honey, in his 23 February 2011 article for the website Colorline, "King's Fight for Unions is Still Essential," pointed out how racially motivated the attacks on public employees by GOP governors like Wisconsin's Scott Walker and Ohio's John Kaskch are [clarifications and amplifications are in brackets]:
"Even in Midwest states that have been union strongholds, Republicans now have public-employee unions in their cross-hairs. This is the latest and potentially most deadly phase of [a GOP sponsored] government assault on unions. Ever since the Reagan counterrevolution, government policies joined with private sector profiteers have vastly worsened racial-economic inequalities, created a gambling casino on Wall Street and paved the way for the current economic crisis.
Conservatives rationalize their attacks on unions by saying unionized public workers are unfairly privileged. But they only look privileged by comparison to the rest of the working class, which is suffering economic catastrophe and has almost entirely lost the benefits of unionization. [See Neil Irwin's 26 September 2014 New York Times column "The Benefits of Economic Expansions Are Increasingly Going to the Richest Americans," for more on this subject. But avoid doing so on a full stomach.] Yet class envy is an easy means to divide and rule.
Racism is another part of the Republican arsenal of divide and rule. Thanks to the destruction of manufacturing jobs and unions, black and Latino workers in manual occupations have disproportionately suffered high rates of poverty and incarceration as many of their families disintegrate. The one toe-hold many black and minority workers (and especially women among them) still have in the economy is in unionized public employment. Now, the Republicans want to take that away."
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