The Coffee Cure

A recent article touting the benefits of drinking coffee for women has been gnawing at me. The coffee study purported to link treating depression in women with a daily cup of coffee. I know of these studies. Ever since I became an avid coffee drinker in college 20+ years ago, and ever since I quit a few years ago, then resumed on an occasional basis, I have seen these studies: some purport to say coffee is harmful. Others report the opposite. This seems to have been a constant conflict for at least 20 years.

But that is not what bothered me with this recent finding that coffee could treat depression in women. Then it dawned on me:

Why are women depressed? That is the Question.

When you're standing outside History and know it, a certain kind of challenge, a certain kind of consciousness, must always be engaged.

You have to beware and be highly suspicious without lapsing into paranoia at how arguments are framed for you and the parameters set around those arguments. Because, to put it another way, one of the reasons certain judge and cabinet appointments, certain activists, and certain arguments cannot be entertained is the establishment - the victors! - want to control the argument.

In this case, in our contentiousness about caffeine and our pill-popping culture, having a cup of coffee without regret is supposed to be the focus of this so-called study.

That is why determining the reasons for depression in women is not the operative issue, and it should be. Like, "why they hate us," this cannot really be discussed.

Why would they be depressed, making 70 cents on the mighty dollar; less if you are Black or Latina; much, much less if you are a native American woman?

Why would they be depressed if, besides making less wages, despite their population they trend toward lower-skilled, blue collar professions?

Why would they be depressed if they face harassment in the workplace, glass ceilings toward advancement?

Why would they be depressed if they are alone in shouldering the rearing of their children with no affordable child care?

Why would they be depressed if many men and much of society view them as punching bags to vent their frustrations [who needs that cup of coffee?!]?

We are not supposed to ask such questions. We are not supposed to tell the emperor he is naked. The reactionaries I unfortunately know - and too many of them presently - in their role as supporter of the establishment will attack the woman's will power, her character, her inflated sense of entitlement ... because there is nothing otherwise amiss.

I say, if a woman is depressed she might just need to break something, literally. If the system is too big to break at the moment, try some of the machinery at the job that oppresses her (a radical group of contract employees did just this in San Francisco in the 90's). This can have a liberatory effect on the spirit, short of walking out on your wage-slavery, which can have unforeseen consequences. Break up the romantic relationship. Break off the engagement. Break patriarchy. Break some dishes.

I don't know where to start, but a cup of coffee seems a peculiar place. Don't pick a commodity picked by under-waged workers, many of whom are women. But that's the point, isn't it?

Why Tyranny?

Something exciting is happening on Facebook in the last week, where a groundswell of candid photos from Occupy Wall Street and other cities, blog articles, declarations, and personal observations have become the norm and the cascade of banal cuteness has finally abated. It is engaging to see so many people engaged. Social networking has reached a high-water mark.

But the outcomes to these movements is no where guaranteed if we look at the present and at history. Just today, the mainstream news is celebrating the death of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American, killed by a drone in Yemen. On the orders of Pres. Obama, this citizen - without a trial of any kind - was targeted for murder, "on or off a battlefield." Reading the reports carefully you can glean why, like bin Laden, no trial could have been held.

Words like "reportedly," "possibly," "credited," and "linked" would not have withstood a fair and open court hearing. So, true to our Southern Justice roots, the US just goes out and lynches al-Awlaki, thereby adding to its list of war crimes.

Of course, history is a brutal panorama of vicious campaigns against those who seriously challenge the power base, who seriously attempt to dismantle a system celebrated in the founding Federalist Papers that "those who own the country should run it."

Civil Rights activists, labor organizers, socialist, anarchist, communist party insurgents, anti-war militants have all been infiltrated, discombobulated, and targeted for extermination by the state - with great success: witness the pathetic state of our labor-unions, which are more collaborationist than changing the social and economic order, which was their birthright. This reformist tendency in our labor movement is simply because there is "no there there:" the militants were driven out by law or killed.

For the current movement against neoliberalism and globilization to succeed, we must be engaged in whatever capacity with the present, while seeing far into the future. We must anticipate the state may tolerate auditoriums and parks filled with critics bearing home-made signs; the state does not as easily tolerate its destruction - even at the hands of the majority.

We must also anticipate in these broad-based, mass gatherings, which are beautiful to behold, are a range of political ideas, from libertarian socialism to Ron Paul Tea Party activists, all with legitimate gripes against an horrific system.

If these movements grow, expect the Tea Party to want to assume the helm as the rightful leadership. Given their closer proximity to state power structures, the establishment will maneuver to back them, and whatever "revolution" that happens will be on those reactionary lines with some reforms made to neoliberalism only.

A friend asked me the other day why I describe my workplace as a tyranny. The word struck him as something ancient or better suited to a foreign country. Hierarchies are always at great risk at becoming tyrannies, be they in the home or at work, more so when the work imposed is antithetical to human needs.

When so many garments must be produced by a few tired hands, or so many passengers processed through a security checkpoint by a few understaffed officers, or food processed by a time clock by underpaid cooks, you must have someone's boot on the worker's neck at all times. That boot must inflict pain on those who do not produce fast enough.

That is a tyranny.

Fidel asked in his indictment of the US-backed dictatorship: "How can an unpopular regime, inimical to the interests of the people, stay in power unless it is by force?"

The same could be asked not only of our present governments, which increasingly oppose peoples' desires but also equally important, this can be asked of our workplaces, which are tyrannies.

9/11 and our apparent complacency to war: a long-view perspective

The upcoming ten-year anniversary of 9/11 is a cause for mourning on a few fronts. We are reminded of the 3,000 lives lost in the Twin Towers. But our thoughts can never be far from the greater carnage that's come from the aftermath due to the US assault.

Activists from the progressive side may mark this anniversary with a very mixed progress report. Their activism was intense - and predictably ignored - under the Bush junta.

The US government flouted international law, silenced dissent, imprisoned hundreds of unnamed people in secret and not-so-secret prisons from so-called "battlefields", extraordinarily rendered countless more to their torturers in our client regimes, like Mubarak's Egypt - in short, our government was a war criminal.

But for the duration of Obama's first term, the progressive left has been silent and made myriad excuses for Obama, this tool of Wall Street and the right-wing. The Bush crimes are still fully in force, and the current administration has added a war in Libya.

It must seem hypocritical to lament so publicly the needless deaths of 3,000 souls and yet be so mute to the slaughter of 300,000 lives.

Ten years is not a long time, but it is too long to be bombed and menaced by a Super Power. Reagan stupidly imagined the revolutionary government of Sandinistas marching across the border from Nicaragua to invade the US. But imagine if that poor nation had done so, and persisted in its assault for 10 full years of meddling in our politics, bombing soft targets like neighborhoods and hospitals, and imprisoning civil-rights activists in the name of Nicaraguan socialism.

Would you be so complacent?

Just Cause? So since many a Bostonian Irish-American funded the Irish Republican Army in the 70's, I guess Her Majesty's Government would have been justified to send the royal navy to bomb Boston harbor.

9/11 also marks the US-sponsored coups d'etat in Chile. 1973, when it toppled the democratically elected government of Marxist Salvador Allende and installed a dictator/general, Augusto Pinochet. Would a free Chile be justified now in hunting down Henry Kissinger and airing his execution on prime time TV?

But if we can't imagine such things as: the villainy we teach being executed right back on us, how can we see the greater crimes that persist right under our noses?

Our collective responses to the crimes of our times has also been a mixed one.

Here are a few notable examples:

[1] The Hundred Year's war against workers, which roughly began during the Industrial Revolution.

Rural laborers and sharecroppers were driven from the land in the 1800's and into urban ghettos to work in factories. The so-called captains of Industry made wage-slaves out of rural laborers and newly arrived foreign immigrants, with poor working conditions, low wages, and even employing children.

The overseer contingent from the plantation era became the management class, from literal whip to write-ups and reprimands, to watch the workers and punish those who do not perform.

Sure, activists have made gains in labor rights since then - eight-hour work days and minimum-wage rights, for example - but these hard-won gains have always been within the confines of the master's industrial design, within those urban ghettos. Can a Nazi credibly reform a death camp, or must that death camp be abolished?

In other words, we have been content to carve out from within this prison camp a small measure of humanity, not content to destroy it.

This small measure of humanity is minute because it must never impede on the purported rights of corporations to reap profits wherever and however it can.

[2] A 500 Year's War against the global South, also known as the Third World, the colonies.

Many books have been written and careers made on justifying this war.

I remember in college being handed a paper by the late UN ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, which argued the poor of Central America were not culturally averse to being brutalized by US-backed dictators, because their very lives were already utterly miserable. This shit passed for scholarship at Washington University, my alma mater.

This war on the global South is based on one fact, and one unmentioned fact alone: most of the global North is not fit for human life. To make it fit for human life and to create a palatial estate of golf courses and industrial wealth, the global North needs to pirate the resources and labor of the global South. It's that simple. You won't likely survive a Norwegian winter without oil.

For civilization to thrive, Europe has had to underdevelop the global South, and if certain people of the global South don't like it, they will have to face a dictator armed by the US, France, Spain, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium ... the usual suspects. If they dare try to organize a union, they will have their heads blown off with rifles made in the USA.

But, as the infomercials say, there's more:

[3] The Ten Thousand year's War on the land base has, as one activist called it, been a wound on the planet.

It was 10,000 years ago the agricultural revolution changed the shape of so much of humanity. We are told this has been for the better, but the ecosystems might say otherwise, if they could speak.

This revolt against nature - demonstrated by Nature's defiance to fight back with every weed - not only began the destruction of the habitat, the destruction of old-growth forests, decimation of rainforests, and millions of exterminated species; it has also poisoned the water and air and threatened humanity.

Land settlement and agriculture meant a dramatic change in human interactions unknown until that time. Archeological excavations show the contrast from before the agri-revolution, where our nomadic communities distributed its resources equitably and lived for tens of thousands of years without menacing the land base.

I repeat: in North America, we had communities living and thriving for tens of thousands of years and did nothing to harm the environment like "civilization" has in just a few hundred.

This is in sharp contrast with post-agriculture, when the implications of land ownership for sustenance changed forever relations between sexes, beginning that wedge between men's wealth [land] and women, who either became subjects of men or turned to abject prostitution, which are the same things.

Class war was born between those who controlled the land and those who came to work the land. Activists have seemed to cede the argument by demanding those who own be taxed more rather than that they should own nothing.

Slave religions were born, to justify the lot of the poor - slaves will always be with us! - the pirating of the rich, and our obedience to hierarchies.

These slave religions obviously metamorphasized into top-down power structures, like mega-Churches, like the Roman Catholics, divine-rights of kings, and the cultural celebration of the titans of industry - the billionaires.

These atrocities have become fixtures on the cultural landscape as accepted as the old redwoods used to be, with some resistance to reform them, make them less pungent to the smell.

So there you have it, a sea of complacency from beginning to end.

If the current US war is no longer talked about but an elephant in the room, our wars on workers, resource-rich regions in the global South, and on Nature has become as much a fixture as wallpaper and not even discussed.

How different are those who are silent different than the Germans during the blight of Naziism? Those Germans followed orders or claimed not to know about the heinous crimes against humanity being committed. How many times have my sheepish coworkers shrugged their shoulders and said, "that's the way it is"?

We have lived so long away from the land, in our urban work prisons, within an artificially designed system that benefits only the Master, that we have mistaken this urban wage-slavery for Nature itself, and - dangerously - our local markets as the source of our food.


Our lifestyles, particularly the last hundred years and less, have been dominated by an increasing power of the state for the obvious purpose to defend the power base. That power base could be the king, a nobility, and old order, the corporation/multinational. But this power base must be protected from us, which is why it is critical that not only we impose failed states on the conquered but endure them our own selves.

Name one democratic institution in the United States of America. I dare you.

If that is not history in a nutshell, I do not know what is. Because, both the corporation and its evil offspring, civilization, have been a menace to society and would not thrive without armies and navies and secret police and court systems to ensure we do not get out of line.

The Stirrings in the workforce our Masters don't want us to talk about

Since Reagan's Revolutionary "recovery" after he and Congress drove the economy into the free market ground worker satisfaction with our "jobs" has diminished across the economy.

No wonder why. The jobs this country has created in every recovery are lower waged, less skilled, and, far worse, without benefits of pension, retirement, or the ability to save for that future when Wall Street dreams of grasping its evil hands on that leaden lock box called Social Security.

The shrinking of union work is suggestive too, but since our unions are increasingly reformist - accommodating corporate structures in exchange for a "cut" in union dues and prestige - unions are a far cry from their militant origins, when its goal was worker control of production, not high wages, no management except self-management.

So late 20th century and 21st century workers find themselves in a predicament. They were driven into the strategic hamlets we call cities over a century ago in the wake of the Industrial Revolution; they were trained to work on a treadmill [viz., factory floor, pushing paper in a cubicle]; and they can now can do little more than survive by keeping the wheel of their own destruction spinning ... spinning the twine to make the noose that hangs them.

When ends don't meet, they spin faster, and have even a generation ago begun to send their teen-aged children to work the treadmill. Because, to blow the mill out of the universe - to destroy it - would leave too many workers with a skill-set barely enabling them to tie a shoe but little else.

We can't farm. We can't build. Many can't even pull apart their car engines and rebuild them. The urbane existence we are supposed to consider a pinnacle of civilization has in reality done what the antebellum slave master could not do: many of those African slaves risked life and limb to read and write and to escape. We are grown, illiterate children.

My Tennessee grandparents talked a lot about this in my youth, when they rued the next Depression. The one they survived in the 1930's they survived because while they were dirt poor, they had food from their land and practical skills to sustain themselves.

We deeply loathe our employment, but the Stockholm Syndrome says we are one with it too. Our jobs do less and less for us, except eek out the barest minimum existence, but this basic we've turned into ..."I am lucky to have a job" and bow and curtsey, tug-at-your-locks obedience.

So we are caught between the proverbial rock of joblessness and no means to feed/house ourselves and the hard place of work.

Two reasons employers are not fretting about this.

One must be their deep-seeded faith that we workers will not seek alternatives beyond what the master provides. Thanks to lessons learned in the factory system of education, we've learned to shut up. Otherwise, I should think an employer who has even 50% of his workforce actively seeking work elsewhere would be alarmed.

Two that where the employer may lose a portion of that job-dependent 50% to another job, there's another job-dependent 70% waiting to step in - if only for a moment.

The wasted costs of training and the signal that your workers' minds are elsewhere is no concern, possibly because the training is so minimal, the work not critical. Ask yourself in whatever job you labor if you'd trust a surgeon or even an dentist to operate on you with the level of training you and your colleagues got. If the answer is No, your training is probably over-blown and over-hyped.

Make no mistake. This is a powder-keg. What will ultimately ignite it is hard to pinpoint; and how that coming disaster will destruct is hard to predict. Because when workers take a page from the stockbroker and stop looking at the picture but at the broader canvass - even into the next economic quarter - all Hell will break loose.

Tottenham

There's a specter haunting the West. It is the specter of the colonials over-running the White Race and its 1,000-year old faux civilization. In the 60's the West was haunted by the specter of the Blacks over-running their cities, so it mobilized the White Race and extended Slave Codes - Jim Crow, Counter-Reconstruction, Red-lining, etc - over the mostly urban population, criminalized a host of behaviors, and put that population through the meat grinder of the criminal-"justice" system.

By West, I do not mean the populations but rather the governments, who are empowered to maximize any thing that brings profits to corporations. In fact, it's difficult to distinguish the government from the corporations. Just look at the current US president's Cabinet.

By White Race, I cannot mean White people, most of whom are working class and victims of this economic system. White Race is a clever guise by which corporations can justify its existence, can pit one set of workers against another.

But the West's actions to mitigate the threat of the colonials - a pre-cursor to the war on "Terror," in fact - could never come to a conclusion. History is literally against the West, and deep in the bowels of its banks, it knows this.

More and more of the US states are passing or contemplating racist laws purportedly to "control" colonials from the global South. This of course pre-supposes the White Race in the Americas is not illegal and is not the creature that should be controlled. Despite such maneuvers as NAFTA and the utter decimation of Mexico's rural life, the theft of water from Peru and India, etc., the criminal behavior of the West's governments is an exoticism left to college seminars and rogue radicals in black masks throwing bottles filled with inflammables. It is not to be discussed among serious people.

So the Tottenhams - site of the recent London "riots" - always, always come as a surprise to the gullible. But the serious people with any sense are scared. Good.

In the UK right now, signs that its government have never really assimilated its former colonials - West Indian and African Blacks and East Asians - are literally burning the streets down in London and reaching up to Liverpool.

While the US has made some pedestrian, window-dressed steps to assimilating its former slaves [see Richard Rodriguez' "Hunger for Memory"], the UK has maintained essentially a 50-year guest-worker program and kept its imports in Old World ghettos.

It isolated these "Black Britons" to bantustans in perpetuity, thrown in some vocational training for jobs that didn't exist, accessorized it with a royal charity [The Prince's Trust], and otherwise ignored these non-people while the "country" pretended it relived some medieval tribal fantasy.

So when the colonials get restless at a lack of a means to support themselves, the weight of the foot of royal police on their necks, or shooting of their children like they were foxes in the pastoral hunt, the hierarchy's press people pretend to wonder why, official community leaders condemn the violence, and the government threatens to bring out the water canons, etc., etc.

These governments - all over Europe - are scared shitless that this series of events might mark their inevitable twilight.

What began in Tottenham did not really begin there, but must be seen as a continuum that stretches to one side in Cairo, to Yemen, to Tunisia, to India. It also extends back to the burning cities of the 60's, Mexico and Paris in 1968, the Pink Tide spreading across Latin America, the riots after the Simi Valley verdict acquitting the LAPD of gross misconduct, the riots after the Oscar Grant slaughter in Oakland, which saw that young man's murderer walk free, and countless other agitations that keep getting explained away as peripheral.

These are not only riots. They are uprisings. The compromised Western media and the bought Western politician will of course condemn the burning, the looting, the trashing because in Britain they must really believe that ancient legal convention that "the Queen can do no wrong."

But whether they believe in Queen and Country or not, they know the score. These governments and their other halves, the corporations, are in a tough spot. Their very existence, their successes, their wealth, have been built directly on the backs of the colonials' labors and the colonials homelands. But the score card pretty clearly shows sooner or later, this specter will in fact overwhelm them.

They know they are a chilled shriveling corpse that must live on the blood, sweat, gold, oil, etc., etc., of persons that must - legally speaking - be deemed as their inferiors, which takes us back to those Slave Codes.

This legal convention can be seen in the racist nature of every single institution on both sides of the swamp.

There is nothing about the modern age that alters basic biology. Although we are in the the 21st century, this has not changed the need of the parasite for its host, any more than modernity makes tiny, inhospitable Europe a terrain fit for human life. It is not. It is cold, damp, and barren, and to sustain any vibrancy it must suck the life-force from the global South.

This is why - at bottom - these degenerate governments have swarmed like locusts into the Arab world, why it begs China, loots Libya, menaces Cuba, and, why, at any cost - believe me - they will put down these colonial upstarts wherever they raise their defiance: in London, in Cairo, in Caracas, in Oakland or in Bensonhurst.

It will not be enough for these uprisings to bring down the Coalition government between the Conservative and Liberal-Democrat Parties. Although that would be a small gain indeed.

Our systems of government, on both sides of the Atlantic and throughout the Western world are less an expression of popular voice and more like the crude, barbarism of the management class. We know our managers at our work places: part drones, part pre-historics, all brute force to keep the rabble in line. They are not coaches; they are coercive.

Coercion is the only way to keep humans from being human and to make them into machines to toil for one purpose and not agitate.

This is the essence of our Western democracies, and this is why we seemingly have no control over our public policies, foreign or domestic, why war crimes we are against continue to be perpetrated in our name, why we cannot get a decent community need met.

But bombs can be dropped on soft targets in the global South. Rogue leaders who do not follow the management directives can be run out or assassinated. And guest workers in the metropolises - London, New York, Los Angeles, Paris - can be set upon like sport.

This is why we must throw the managers to the dogs and burn not only the institutions to the ground but also our addled dependence on them.

The existence of this system obviously makes problematic any "justice" for the colonials from these governments - the Blacks, the Browns, the working-class Whites, the Southasians and East Asians, the Indigenous are not likely to find any reparation or revolution from this system.

Che Guevara's famous admonition was to give birth to 100's more Vietnams, 100's more "slave" rebellions against the global North. Who knows what will finally spark this mass uprising to burn the dead brush from the landscape: will we look back at Tottenham like we who know better look back at the Haymarket riots in Chicago?

Following Orders

Among anarchist circles exists the primitivist contention that civilization is bad and needs dismantling and the anti-primitivist response that were the primitivist reality come to pass, "people will die" without the many benefits modern society has given humanity. I've hear this so many times it's become a TV jingle in my head.

But I don't hear a similar response from aspects of the broader left when it comes to neoliberal policies attacking social programs, and I wish I did. The anarchists debates are real debates between dismantling management structures and replacing them with worker-owned, worker-run job sites or doing away with the agricultural-industrial model altogether to free us.

Liberals don't have real debates, particularly when it comes to neoliberalism. These policies did not begin in the 80's but gained an intensity under Reagan and Thatcher with a selling off of public goods, attacks on the poor, women, minorities; continued under Clinton with Welfare Reform; and just now driven further into the heart of the New Deal under the hammer of Pres. Barack Obama, Wall Street's Boy Toy and menace to society.

The debt-ceiling deal just signed is catastrophic. And while I am more sympathetic than not with the primitivist, anti-civilization arguments, I find myself employing its opposition's "people will die" refrain when it comes to policies clearly being passed.

People will die.

Because, unlike the primitivist arguments, which has little consensus and no legislative support, the neoliberal program is real and in the here and now ... and aside from attacking Head Start, education funding, community health centers, Medicare, health programs for women, like breast cancer screening, food programs it will also eliminate federal jobs and employment programs.

This time, for real, people will die. What do we think happens to a woman who cannot get early breast cancer screening except that she will likely die? What do we think happens to the poor who cannot access food programs except they will get sick and die?

I'm often asked about people's lack of response. Why in the face not only of the mass extermination of Nature, the salmon, the wetlands, the rain forests, 100's of species per hour but also the incremental extermination of human beings, politically driven famines in the global South, like in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Haiti, austerity measures in the North and South cutting off food supports, access to health care, and selling off natural reserves do we not counter-attack?

Why don't the collective masses rise up and cut off the heads of these degenerates and obliterate the system which clearly and empirically oppresses us? All kinds responses - form the so-called passive to the so-called violent - would seem to be on the table, but few are.

Why do we follow orders?

The Factory System imposed on our public education system of model of obedience onto students being prepped to be industrial workers. Indeed, much of public education was motivated to assimilate former rural farm workers and immigrants into the industrial system.

As at your workplace, rewards came by sitting in your chair, not challenging the teacher or the system. Disruption was met with various kinds of progressive discipline up to and including expulsion [firing]. It was a weeding out process of good workers from bad. And the better workers learned the degenerate lessons that you keep your head down, your thoughts to yourself, and obey the manager/master/teacher.

The obvious problem is besides creating a nation of slaves to whatever system is in place is that system can evolve into a NAZI Germany or a 21st century global North [e.g., USA, UK, France, Spain, et al] so dependent on the resources of the global South - this dependence proof of the primitivist argument, by the way - the global North has broken every domestic or international law or human rights convention or basic human civility and commit crimes against humanity, war crimes, and savage act.

And the docile, well-trained, well-schooled "workers" - those who learned the lessons best - will keep their heads down, run the mill, the factory, the workplace, or even drop bombs on innocents and just keep following orders.

So our only hope is from those who refuse to follow orders.

What's left of the labor movement

It's hard to read recent labor news with any optimism. Further it's hard to put any more credibility in a US labor movement as workers get assaulted and trades-unions seem to capitulate.

What it will mean in a few years to have a labor-union is a depressing thought.

The state of Wisconsin has just rammed through a measure which strips its public-employee unions of collective-bargaining rights. Indiana followed suit. Ohio was next in what proves to be, given the neoliberal climate, a very long chain of brutal assaults on workers.

Like a vicious wildfire, this menace to working people moves virtually unchecked.

Yes, some state legislators have gone into hiding to prevent the Wisconsin bill from passing. Yes, there's a lot of wailing at the wall from progressive lawmakers. Yes, the protests have been loud and numerous against this assault.

But my pessimism tells me this will ultimately have as much affect on this neoliberal attack as ... the millions who oppose the US war in the Middle East (this holds true for the populations of Western Europe, who differ sharply from their political masters, so we are approaching a 10 Years' War).

The trades-union movement, if we can call it that anymore, has for so long implicated itself with the neoliberal model its meaning was eroded a long time ago.

Observe to some of these union chiefs:

On the federal level, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) gears up for a union vote of its officers. Bush II denied TSA officers collective-bargaining rights when he established the agency, rights afforded to every other federal agency.

So this vote would seem to be a victory after hard-fought efforts by officers, and the two unions vying for officer support.

But, like recent anti-labor moves, TSA chief, John Pistole, has effectively negotiated the contract unilaterally.

In a recent NPR interview, National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) president, Colleen Kelley, responded to TSA's Pistole Wisconsinesque maneuver to take security issues, wages, discipline policies, testing, qualifications off the bargaining table as non-negotiable.

 Kelley said her union can assist TSA officers with transfers to other airports and work schedules. But the competing union, American Federation of Government Employees [AFGE], can do little more.

Closer to my home, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has authorized over 5,000 lay off notices.

According the LA Times, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) union president, AJ Duffy, responded with "This large number of proposed layoffs shows that LAUSD has clearly abandoned its all-too-frequent, and hollow, promise to 'keep cuts away from the classroom."

Acceding to the promise that jobs cuts be kept away from teachers and, implicitly, other workers is problematic. It really seems to come not from a union leader, who should know better, but rather the rest of the population who are kept ignorant of the vital role of non teaching staff in public schools. So when that non teaching staff disappears, the general public don't notice and are therefore unlikely to agitate.

A union head of teachers should know that the various staff members at a school - counselors, office staff, even maintenance workers and janitors - are extremely vital to the community of a school. And he should also know, as the saying goes: an injury to one really is an injury to all.

But this is exactly what generations of concessions have won trades-unionists: no power, one layoff after another, being taken for granted numerous times by "their friends in Congress".

You can hear a pin drop to their official challenges to an overall corrupt system. The all-things-on-the-table war - to limit it to my life time - should have been declared in the early 1980's.

When Pres. Ronald Reagan (himself a former union chief!) fired the air-traffic controllers: that should have been the next chapter in a class war.

Instead, Reagan's move was a class purge.

[Question: just how many workers have to be laid off and left with no means of support before "you" put all options rhetorically back on the table? - just a thought.]

As modern, collaborating unions concede to neoliberal doctrine, union bosses' best defense for its existence is pedestrian.

We hear how breaking up unions is shrinking the middle class; that it was the union movement that swelled the ranks of good wage-earners, but this defense is also problematic.

On wages.

The fetish for good wages in a corrupted system leads to the very social and economic inequalities we see today and have always seen, notably, in the global South where trades-unionism was not tolerated by Uncle Sam. It seems now Uncle Sam won't tolerate unionism within its own borders.

Making wages a central issue is a co-conspirator defense to essentially partner with a neoliberal system, inherently corrupt, to take a cut of the spoils. It is also not the sum of what it means to be a trades-union activist.

To reduce the union movement to wages not only dismisses a long and militant history that brought us our cherished labor rights - in and outside the union [i.e., the eight-hour workday benefits all workers] but also misses issues around the legitimacy of private ownership, management, and what makes for an ideal society.

In other words, today, a harsh wage[-slave] system is defended, just as chattel slavery was, by putting the very reward central to the argument. The union movement has conceded the argument.

And on management.
A major issue is management. When I state point-blank that we should get rid of management, I am often asked "then who will manage?", which implies laborers, like chattel slaves, as being too untrustworthy to be let loose without the ever-present overseer with his whip.

In most workplaces the workers know and often articulate that they themselves can make better decisions in running affairs than the ones being made by their overseers, but this conflicts with what the ghosts of the Federalist Papers have taught us about democracy: it's not a good thing.

Democratic workplaces, worker self-management will not survive a neoliberal paradigm. Profit is key. Wall Street is key. And the more immediate that profit the better. 

The role of management is to keep the workers from benefiting one another, the workplace, and the community. Their role is to preserve at all costs the central importance of Wall Street [erroneously called "The Economy"].

More importantly management is vital to preserve a governance system which demands, not competence, but rather obedience from workers. It is there to remind us to know "our" place.

This is what traditional trades-unionism resisted. Modern unions may find my thinking from Mars.

By why this refusal to fight back by trades-unions, why this acquiescence to the dominant neoliberal paradigm that welcomes with open arms wage-slavery, why concede an inch to management?

This government waged a vicious hot and cold war against the early labor movement: mass deportations with the Palmer Raids, assassinations, imprisonments, of anti-war activists, leftists, communists, and anarchists. Then to cap it off Congress prohibited the inclusion of anarchists and communists from US labor unions with the 1947 Taft-Hatley Act, which encoded into law attacks against "militants", weakening labor unions, and establishing right-to-work states, where unions are prohibited. The air was sucked right out of a militant movement and it has left us today gasping.

Those who survived that historic assault must have very small lungs and weak voices.

Whose Shopping Therapy?

A hyper-consumer society can only thrive with hyper consumers, rich and poor, not only ready to pull out the checkbook or credit card at the drop of a hat (or point of a GI gun, threat of eviction, cloud of starvation), but also willing to line up at the check-cashing place for a more expensive "loan."

A hyper-consumer society can only thrive if it promises that every wish can be fulfilled, every heart's desire met through that checkbook, credit card, or however much you can squeeze out of the check cashing rock.

A hyper-consumer society will persist only when so-renamed "consumers" [formerly known as "citizens"] can only see their desires met from the array of treasures, trinkets, gadgets, wovens, and concoctions offered in the display case - no more and no less. No imagination required. Imagination is discouraged.

A hyper-consumer society can only exist within a strategic hamlet, where the consumers are made to consume through purchases authorized by the powers-that-be, the state, and never outside or free from that state's authority.

A hyper-consumer society will only exist if said hyper consumers cannot distinguish needs from wants, and so see nothing "hyper" or "schizo", or "pathological" about their consuming patterns. After all, they might argue: what society does not consume? From the Pre-historic (strange, ill-fitting term), Classical (overstated), feudal, or modern: they all consume something, food and air and water.

A hyper-consumer society can only thrive if the consumers feel entitled to the treasures and trinkets in the display case.

A hyper-consumer society can only thrive if the consumers feel someone else is less entitled to those treasures - if they are apt to feel anything at all. Those less entitled will be given a lower step on the ladder and bestowed with various names: but they are ultimately and empirically Slaves.

A hyper-consumer society will always exist in close proximity - by rail, plane, boat, or canal zone - to a slave society, because hyper consumers depend on extracting their treasures from those slaves (and call the relationship "trade," "purchase," "enterprise zones," "treaty rights").

A hyper-consumer society is a society without a soul, not only because the extent of its desires and imagination are limited to those display cases but also because it persists in meeting those desires on the backs of [its] slaves. It must by definition keep the slaves down (e.g, put the n*gger in his place, guard the border, hunt down "illegals," etc), be content that while the slaves may be entitled to little, that is all they can handle because they are deemed "backwards." The hyper consumers are always entitled to more than enough. This pathological dichotomy will be rationalized in academic studies and political white papers.

A hyper-consumer society will persist in trying to fill its soul with treasures from the display case, which means never lifting its boot from the slaves' necks, because hyper consumer's imagination is as limited as the slave's liberty. And consumers are bred to consume: that is all they are taught to know.

A hyper-consumer society, having little developed insight, no real intuition, will be forever puzzled at its own crises, its poverties, its slums, its crime rates, because hyper consumers - who used to be citizens - are so limited in their imagination and intuitiveness they cannot fathom what impoverishes a man, woman, or child as robbing their treasures from them will certainly do, and why that man, woman, and child must be made a slave.

A hyper-consumer society exists on the precipice but must refuse to acknowledge that, like their neighbors, they may be the next easy victim.


[For Jasmine: the student who teaches the teacher]