This article was written for the Right-wing blogs, although I am having difficulty finding conservative sites to post it on. In general their blogs are much more controlled than those on the Left. If any one has any suggestions please let me know.
Warning! this post is long.
On Southern Heritage, the Tea Party, and the Problem of Wal-Mart
The Southern Tea Party
As I was driving through rural Tennessee and Virginia in early October, I knew that the Democrats were going to get clobbered this time around. It wasn’t a thing that I was actually celebrating mind you. I very much fear that through the "revolution" of the Tea Party the corporations may be about to regain the power that they had over government in the Bush years. It ain’t that I am married to the Democrats. In truth they betray Labor more often than not. It is just that I can’t find any Republican candidates that will vote in favor of working class people over the interests of their corporate masters, ever.....period. I sincerely hope that some of your Tea Party candidates will break this longstanding Republican tradition, a tradition dating back to the 1860s when the Yankees invaded us and forced their commercial/industrial way of life upon us.
You see, I am a far Lefty....way further Left than Progressive or Liberal, far enough Left to keep my handy little carbine around, with a half dozen loaded magazines, as well as my trusty old deer rifle for more "reach-out and touch someone" type work. Being a good Southern lad, Daddy taught me to track and to shoot and to make shit go "BOOM!" too, just like many of you. And I, like most of you, yet believe in the Jeffersonian Dream of a common man’s armed democracy.
I have no problem with your desire to make government smaller and more responsive. Like any good Rebel I have a strong anarchist streak. Jefferson, following John Locke, said that government is an evil necessity. In the evil part, I usually agree with them. It is the necessity thing that I am not always so sure about. So I write to you not as a Big Government Liberal but as a cultural anarchist, or as an Ultra Libertarian, if you prefer. Again, like many of you, I believe we have the means to solve our own problems at the community level, if we are left alone to do so.
Now I get to the part of this little rant when I start saying things that are probably gonna piss a lot of you boys off. That is fair enough. Shoot back if you can. But before you start calling me "socialist-commie", "progressive elitist" or just plain old "nig**r-lover" check out:
The Nichols family "good ole boy" Credentials
You might just find out that my family history and background ain’t that different from your own.
There is a glaring hypocrisy within the Republican Tea Party, for which I must now take my white Southern brethren to task. You say Big Government is evil. Ok, I get that and I tend to agree. But if this so, what the hell makes Big Business so good? It is just as powerful as government and just as evil. In fact, government, for all its excesses, is not actively destroying our environment or wastefully exhausting our resources, but Big Business is. Why is that ok?
You want to throw out all of the self-serving politicians, but all those lying, thieving, economy-destroying corporate executives are still to be admired and bowed down to? You think they should continue to be allowed wage economic war on our People and on our Planet, indeed, on the very "Nature" that all you hunters and outdoors-men profess to love so much.
"Wtf?" even. Have the fumes from the Nascar races and the dyes in your camo dulled your "good ole boy" wits so much, or are you just waiting for you balls to finally drop so you can at last be worthy of your Southern warrior ancestors?
If you don’t want Big government folks, you have to have a means of controlling Big Business yourselves. And this can only mean democratic unions, of and for the People. There is no other way. As an individual you cannot stand before them, all you can do is suck up to the boss, the way too many of our ancestors sucked up to the slave owning aristocracy and paid such a terrible cost for it. IF we yet believe in Jeffersonian democracy, and it is not really all about Hate instead of Heritage, then we must be prepared to take on these corporations. There can no meaningful political freedom if the whole of humanity serves in economic bondage, from the lowliest laborer to the most well to do manager or other corporate sycophant. Are only corporate executives and old money capitalists to be considered worthy of the old American standard of Liberty?
This was not our ancestor’s vision, at least not for the 9 out of 10 who owned no slaves and controlled no great landed estates. In their worldview they fought against the Hamiltonian vision of America, of a Republic, only marginally democratic, controlled through Federalism in the commercial interest of wealthy merchants and factory owners.
On the Problem of Wal-mart
Lets take a concrete modern example here, and a home grown one at that. Let’s look for a moment at Wal-mart, Now ole Sam Walton opened his first discount store in Rogers, Arkansas in 1962. By the time of his death 30 years later Wal-mart had grown to be a large international corporation. Today, 18 years later, Wal-mart operates about 3800 US facilities and a similar number in other industrialized nations around the world. Its profits for 2008 were $12.73 billion on sales of $344 billion. It employs about 1,800,000 people, only slightly less than the number of civilian employees of the U.S. government.
Now we have all seen how Wal-mart can come into a small town with a Supercenter and wreck a local economy. Most of us personally know of once proud small business owners who were reduced to wage laborers because they could not compete with Wal-mart’s "low prices" based in their great size, their cheap, mostly foreign made goods, and on their ruthless determination to hold most of their "associates" to part-time, poverty-level wages and a glaring absence of health care.
No corporation on the face of this planet has contributed more to the serious environmental problem of suburban sprawl than Wal-mart. There are nearly as many old abandoned Wal-marts and parking lots blighting our communities as there are operating ones. Now to its credit Wal-mart has made some significant efforts toward thinking about a "green" future. They have designed a few "environmental" stores. But when considered against the scale of the environmental harm they have caused around the globe, it is hard not to regard these efforts as little more than the PR propaganda campaigns of a company with more real economic power than many small nations.
Now it is time to tell my Southern brethren a story; It is story that should shame every single descendant of the courageous men who followed the likes of Lee, Jackson and Forrest. We all know what Wal-mart has done to countless Southern communities and we have so far not been able to do one damn thing about it, not even to give back one ounce of fully justified retribution.
This is the story of a Canadian single mother, who did something that up until this point no one else in North America had had been able to do. Back in 2004 and 2005, she lead a in-house campaign that successfully organized the employees of a Wal-mart store in Jonquiere, Quebec into a union. Her name is Sylvie Lavoie and she is a real working class hero. But three days after the union was certified Wal-mart announced the closing of the store. Bargaining did nothing to change their minds. The store was duly closed. A few other Wal-mart departments have voted in unions in Canada and the U.S. All have been closed in retaliation for the workers in these units exercising their rights under American and Canadian law.
But now here is the real kicker. In China, one of Wal-mart’s biggest trading partners, their stores and other facilities are all unionized. Of course, these unions are part of the Communist Party apparatus and thus Wal-mart figures it can control them through its cozy relationships with Chinese Government.
It is kinda ironic huh? Unions are good enough for Red Chinese workers but not for free born Americans and Canadians who have strong traditions of self-government and self-determination.
In short, Wal-mart has gotten a mite too big for its britches. It is time that it got taken down a peg or two. Since Wal-mart is one of our own homegrown "scallywag" corporations, much like Fed/Ex, or Coca-Cola, I believe it is our Southern duty to take on the task. It is our responsibility to deliver the world from this institutional evil that from the start has been based on the exploitation of Southern labor and of whole Southern communities.
So here is my proposal. I fully believe it a proposal that is firmly within the Jeffersonian traditions of our Southern ancestors, a proper Rebel response.
Let us begin by taking those two years to prepare that two years we did not take in 1861 to prepare for the coming fight. We will need that time, because in it we need to get a union organizing drive going in every one of the 1000 or so Wal-marts operating here in the South. Hopefully our Yankee and Canadian brothers and sisters will support us in our efforts as well. But the main focus should be here. Bentonville, Arkansas, after all, lies within our beloved South.
So you say you don’t like Big Unions? Fair enough. Don’t join one. The National Labor Relations Act gives us the option of forming a union, rather than joining one. It might require that you educate yourself some by going to the NLRB website, or actually getting up off your ass and going to a Local Board office, to talk to an information officer. It might mean pissing your boss off or risking your job.
I don’t care, if you like, call your union the Confederated Workers of Wal-mart, Independent Local Battalion #(store number). Hell, if you like show up in your damn re-enactment gear, or in your cammies or in whatever. What is important is that you show up, that you form ranks with Blacks and Hispanics and Asians and that you take these corporations on directly before they reduce our children to widespread poverty, economic bondage and to unbelievably vast environmental devastation.
Right behind the great "too Big too fail" banks and insurance companies, Wa-lmart absolutely belongs near the top of that very long list of traitorous corporations that we must somehow get a handle on.....now even.
So once there are organizing drives going on in every southern Wal-mart, and of course, even as Wal-mart is breaking the law at every turn, illegally firing pro-union workers, threatening closings that they actually mean, grilling and intimidating workers and generally waging economic terrorism on their own "associates", we then need to set a date. We must do so very publicly for we will need every Southern worker and consumer to understand the importance of our fight. When the day of reckoning comes, when every Wal-mart in the South, and hopefully in all of North America, strikes for legal union recognition, we will need every loyal Southern citizen to boycott in support. I would propose that the date be Thanksgiving weekend, 2012.
In the unlikely event we ever got serious about it, that would give us the time. I know it is unlikely to ever come about. People are too self absorbed. So it is probable that the decision to do something about Wal-mart and all the other corporations will be put off until our children or grandchildren’s generations when the eco-economic devastation they are causing has finally become too great to ignore any longer. What we might have prevented with mere economic battles and sacrifices will in all likelihood have to be paid the way we Southerners have always paid, with massive quantities of good ole Southern Blood. Only this time around, the rest of the world, or at least all working class people within it, are very likely to be bleeding right along with us.
Why-unions.com
Now I don’t work at Wal-mart. I work for the Bway Corporation, a manufacturer of metal and plastic containers operating 20 plants in North America. It is not nearly as large of a corporation as Wal-mart, and correspondingly it is not perpetuating quite as much social and ecological harm. But it is a traditionally managed corporation. It utilizes top-down, greed-driven, decision-making, rather than trying to use the qualitative superiority of team consensus decision-making, at every organizational level, to address the vast ecological, industrial and economic problems of mankind in this Era. It is thus, part of the problem, not part of the solution.
So in encouraging all workers of Wal-mart and every other such corporation to organize themselves into unions, I am not asking anyone to do anything I am not already doing myself.
Why-unions.com
This is a website devoted to, first and foremost, the organization of the workers of the Bway corporation into effective unions. More, generally however, the site is also devoted to helping any worker anywhere learn more about unions, how they work for members, and how that said worker can exercise his or her legal right to attempt to form a union in his/her respective workplace. For any of you good ole boys who yet believe in things like Jeffersonian democracy or the right of the middle and working classes to also get a fair shake in America, I hope you will visit our site.
By doing so you will be helping us out in a few ways:
First, by simply hitting the site you can help raise the visibility of the site on the search engines. Since BWAY is listed as one of the keywords this will help increase the discomfort level of corporate executives by making them realize that a greater audience is watching their actions. What goes on in this campaign will not be confined within the walls of their modern day little sweatshops. By doing this one thing you can help us immensely.
Second, I ask that any of you that belong to and/or believe in unions stop by, join our blog and contribute to it. These postings might range from well-developed articles on various aspects of trade unionism, to testimonials of rank and file union members, to simple statements of support. Our site, only three weeks old or so, is very much still under development and we ask for your help and suggestions to help us make it as effective as possible.
Finally, those of you who know employees of any of the 20 BWAY plants making metal or plastic containers in North America, are strongly encouraged to tell them about us, to direct them towards our website and to encourage them to join us in our fight to make this one little corporation fully unionized.
In closing I would address specifically that self appointed spokesman of the tea party movement, that esteemed crybaby of Fox News, Glen Beck.
You said you wanted a revolution, Glen. You said that Government was too big and too powerful. You even said that all those banks and insurance companies should have been allowed to fail, and I assume that you also believe they should not have been allowed to get "too big to fail" in the first place.
Good. So get on board with our unionized economic revolution. a revolution vastly more everyday, economically meaningful, than the little political one that just came about. Come out and say that free and democratic unions do a have central role to play in the vital necessity of getting these out of control corporations back in line.
Either that or just come on the air and admit that in spite of all your rhetoric about Liberty and the need to get back the principles of our founding fathers, that in the end you are just another little self-serving corporatist bitch.