(Editor’s Comment: Some of the best political commentary I’ve seen comes from a teacher friend, Tom Sobottke of Pewaukee WI, and we’re pleased to provide him space for his words here. Click here to read Tom Sobottke’s Words. Read his comments and let us know what you think.
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“The Know-Nothing movement was actually a group of secret anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish and anti-immigrant political organizations that called itself the American party. The movement, comprised principally of native-born, white, Anglo-Saxon males, came into being in the 1850s, grew rapidly, and waned almost as quickly.
“In the early 1800s, as immigrants continued to flow into the United States, a number of American citizens grew increasingly alarmed. Waves of Germans, who mostly spoke in their native tongue, and Irish, whose thick brogues were difficult to understand, were two groups who inspired the great opposition. The clannish Irish, who were Catholics, were particularly feared and despised.” Read more: Know-Nothing Party
A century and half later, we have the modern day Know Nothings, the Tea Party. Will it thrive long enough to cause the kind of damage the Know Nothings did in the 1850s, when its pro-slavery proclivities brought about the end of the Whigs, then the nation’s conservative party? Might the Tea Party’s extremes so disrupt today’s Republicans that the GOP, too, might be gone?
Perhaps that’s too much to hope for, given the tendency in the nation these days to look for simplistic answers to complex problems.
It is, however, to be hoped that many folks who are finding answers from the Tea Party to solve their very real economic problems will soon see through the charlatans who are leading them and reject these xenophobic shouts.
Sadly, the Tea Partiers and their new Goddess Sarah may be able to cause serious mischief to our nation; already their idiotic rantings are being treated as legitimate by the media. Yes, even the “liberal media” is doing so: The New York Times, the major TV networks, NPR, the Associated Press, etc. all reported Sarah’s disjointed, fiction-filled speech seriously in their Sunday presentations. Of course, you’ll expect Fox News to report her seriously, but the Times and NPR? Come on!
Remember: this Tea Party Convention was run by a private individual; fees were $500 for the conference. This was no legitimate political conference, yet it was treated as such.
Why oh why have we never seen similar coverage of the Green Party meetings, many of which have attracted large crowds? It’s a legitimate third party, running candidates in virtually every state of the union, some even winning offices.
I remember freezing in a January 2003 demonstration outside of Milwaukee’s City Hall with more than 2,000 persons opposing Bush’s plans to lead us into the terribly unnecessary and disastrous Iraq War. Similar demonstrations were held across the nation that January Saturday, but the news coverage was an “inside” story, hardly as well reported as the Tea Party session in Nashville on Feb. 6. The thousands upon thousands of persons who opposed that war rarely got the news that the Alaskan Quitter got this weekend.
None of Sarah’s failures (including her obvious ignorance about simple facts and her notes inked on her hands) seem to daunt many of her followers. They must see their own failures and shortcomings in her actions.
And then how about those of us who like to point out the foolishness of Sarah and her Tea Party-goers? We’re accused of being “elitists” who care nothing about the woes of ordinary folks.
Let’s hope that the basic common sense of our citizens will soon see through the chicanery of this whole Tea Party movement. They soon should realize that the policies this bunch preaches will do little to make the lives of ordinary citizens better, and will indeed make things worse. The Tea Partiers talk about lower taxes, less government, and eternal war: it’s ordinary citizens who lose when there’s no tax revenue to pay for police protection and highways and, yes, Social Security and Medicare; it’s ordinary citizens who will be forced to work in unsafe and unhealthy workplaces and eat unregulated meat full of e-coli; it’s ordinary citizens who supply the soldiers, sailors and marines that will fight and die and be maimed in those eternal wars.
At the risk of being called an elitist, I must urge the Tea Partiers to begin to look at the truth and the facts, rather than cheer the fantasies preached by the Sarah and her cohorts on the platform at the Grand Ol’ Opry Resort in Nashville. Let’s recognize the Tea Partiers are nothing more than a reincarnation of the old Know Nothings, and that party died, but not before it complicated the national debate on slavery.
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It appears the Republicans are on the rampage. Sadly, they’ve been able to fool many working people (now facing tough times). But make no mistake, the GOP is standing with Wall Street and Big Business, as you can hear in this report on Thursday, Feb. 4, by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. (The guts of her comments begin at about 2:19 into the clip.)
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Just 12 years ago this coming May, Howard Zinn spent two memorable days participating in Wisconsin Labor History Society events: our annual conference held in 1998 in Oshkosh and the Bay View Tragedy event a day later in Milwaukee.
This marvelous man, whose life was spent using history to spur ordinary folks to recognize their own potential to “right the wrongs,” died Jan. 27 at the age of 87 of an unexpected heart attack in California.
After his Saturday afternoon presentation to our 1998 annual conference in Oshkosh, I had the honor driving Zinn to his Milwaukee hotel; the next afternoon I picked him up and gave him a brief tour of Milwaukee, as well as showing him the route of the 1886 workers who were marching on behalf of the eight-hour day, just before the State Militia had fired into them, killing seven.
What a singular joy this was! This man who seemed to always have a sparkle in his eye found irony and humor as he discussed the trials and tribulations of the day. (Columnist Bob Herbert of the New York Times has similar reflections in his column of Jan. 30, 2010. Click here to read.)
It surprised us that Zinn, who had made of lifetime career out of chronicling many of the forgotten struggles of working people, admitted he had never before heard of either of these two major labor events in Wisconsin history: the city-wide millworkers strike in 1898 in Oshkosh that brought Clarence Darrow to town to testify in a conspiracy trial against the union leaders or the Bay View Tragedy.
And that was precisely his point: the history of ordinary people is missing from the schools and the textbooks.
The textbooks and teachers, he told the conference audience in Oshkosh, tell about oil baron John D. Rockefeller and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, but not “about the people who worked in Rockefeller’s oil refineries, nothing about the people who worked in Carnegie’s steel mills . . .
“So I had to learn about labor history on my own to find out what was missing in the history books.”
And, of course, learn he did, eventually authoring the marvelous “People’s History of the United States,” which provides great perspective on the realities of history as it affects ordinary citizens, people of color, the poor and the others unheralded in most history books.
Just recently, Zinn participated in “The People Speak,” on the History Channel, in which prominent actors and performers read the words of Americans highlighting the struggle for economic justice and peace. (http://www.history.com/content/people-speak)
Zinn’s philosophy must continue to govern us, even in these days of despair as our economy falters, our troops still fight overseas, banks thumb their noses at us by pocketing huge bonuses in spite of their bungling of the economy, and the Arctic ice cap disintegrates.
It’s fitting, then, that we reflect upon what he told the packed meeting at the Puddlers’ Inn in 1998 at our annual Bay View Tragedy event. Referring to the 1886 massacre that ended, for the time being, the eight-hour day movement, he said: “You can say it was a defeat. They had to go back to work the ten-hour day. . .
“If there is anything important to remember about the Bay View massacre, it’s that no defeat lasts if what is behind it is as struggle for justice, if behind it is a moral cause . . .
“What happened here in Bay View is a reminder that struggle continues and all of us have a responsibility to keep it up.”
Thank you, Howard Zinn.
(For a video of an interesting interview on The Daily Show with John Stewart, go to http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-january-6-2005/howard-zinn
For other links to what others have said about Howard Zinn, go to http://www.howardzinn.org
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If the weight of your years on earth begin to burden you, and you want to give up on the eternal fight for peace and justice, just think of Granny D, who turns 100 on Sunday, Jan. 24th. She is still blogging (yes, at 100 she blogs!), and she has some ideas of how to overcome the Supreme Court’s horrendous anti-democracy ruling. Read it by clicking here.
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Scott Brown, so full of glee that he joyously peddled his daughters as “available,” (though one apparently wasn’t), proclaimed his Massachusetts seat win was a “people’s victory.”
Wrong!
The winners were those who would do very little to really help ordinary folks, middle class working families and the struggling poor. The winners were:
- The health insurance companies, which stand to maintain either a status quo in the health care system, or a compromised health care reform bill that will reward them even more generously by forcing folks into health plans without much public assistance to pay the high premiums. They win either way. The people lose!
- The moguls of our corporations, who will benefit as an energized Republican minority will block every effort at restoring more protections for the welfare of people through OSHA, the EPA and other agencies of government. And, the corporations, too, will win by blocking realistic hope for strong labor law reform, such as the Employee Free Choice Act, further stifling workers’ rights in the workplace.
- The hotshots on Wall Street, who will be able to run wildly back onto the scene, making more speculative loans, avoiding oversight by even more clever use of derivatives and other such strange machinations, while pocketing huge pay checks at the expense of taxpayers who saved their hides. The Republican roadblocks in the Senate may make it now virtually impossible to pass any protections.
- The folks who would deny personal rights, such as same-sex marriages, the right to an abortion, the right to a fair trial and greater fairness in immigration laws. All of these will face continued terrible hurdles in a Federal Court system already skewing to the right; President Obama’s effort to restore any balance to the courts will face the “nay-sayers” of the Republican Party that will block virtually any appointment, leaving the seats open for what they hope will be the next President, a Republican.
The Losers! All of us, although it appears some 52% of folks in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts may not think so now!
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How could it have happened? The tea-baggers! The angry white mobs at the town meetings! The Republicans!
Are these today’s “populists?” The media loves to throw the noun “populist” on these folks, claiming they are the “common people,” or “ordinary folks.” And the reporters use the word “angry” to describe them.
Yet, are these folks really angry? Or is it a show? Or, have they been pumped up by the likes of former GOP Congressional leader Dick Armey and media nuts likes Rush Limbaugh and Glenn back? Lots of evidence shows that the whole movement has been manufactured by big money funneled through the people like Armey and fueled by Fox (Fair and Unbalanced) News. Freedom Works is Armey’s baby, and its board of directors reads like a list of corporate elite, including Steve Forbes of Forbes Magazine and onetime GOP Presidential candidate.
They’ve gathered great steam, creating a bandwagon effect that seems quite formidable and quite possibly this effort may turn the Congress around come November 2010. The news media, including virtually ALL of the so-called liberal press, has given these folks plenty of publicity, further stoking their fire. In comparison, the even more well-attended antiwar rallies (typically all grassrooted) never received such attention. And, only MSNBC and a few media like the Nation and the Huffington Post have properly spotlighted the manufactured nature of this new “populist” movement.
Make no mistake about it! This “populist” movement has indeed fooled lots of ordinary folks into believing this is the place for them.
They’ve identified the Obama Administration as the toadies of Wall Street and the rich; they’ve been misinformed that the health care reform bill would kill grandma; they’ve been told as the snows of winter fall that global warming is a plot by aliens; they blame the loss of jobs and dropping incomes on “liberals.”
Ordinary folks indeed do have lots of be angry about, and they’re easy prey for the charlatans of the rightwing.
The Democrats and the Obama Administration have done little to show that they are indeed the party of working people, of the poor, and of the disenfranchised. So, these befuddled folks, being fooled by the tea-baggers and shouters and Dick Armeys, turn to this “populist” movement for answers.
Unless the Democrats and President Obama begin acting like traditional Democrats (like the party of FDR) the people will indeed jump onto the bandwagon of phony populists. They will eventually learn that they made a huge mistake: the policies these “populists” support will not help ordinary folks in this time of despair. And those who jump on this bandwagon will learn they were bamboozled, but it’ll be too late then.
The truth is: given the chance, this new movement, let’s call them Neo-Populists, would lead this nation into a greater dictatorship of the corporations and wealthy, into a nation of hate and intolerance, and into betraying the ideals and principles that made the United States great.
The Neo-populists care nothing for ordinary citizens. It’s time that message is heard throughout the nation.
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No, I won’t make a New Year’s Resolution this year. Over the last few years, I’ve vowed to cure my addiction to reruns of “Law and Order,” the original and all of its offsprings, but alas, I seem to violate it on the very next “Law and Order” marathon day. I’ve concluded I can’t be cured!
So let’s make resolutions for everyone else:
For President Barack Obama: To free himself from being captive of Wall Street by firing Rahm Emanuel, Ted Geithner, and the other capitalist cronies who seem to be governing his decision-making on matters such as the economy, health care reform and labor union rights.
For Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.): To reinstall into the debate a single-payer health insurance plan as the only real reform for our sick health care system.
For Roger Ailes, the Fox Network boss, and Rupert Murdock, the media mogul: To gain an epiphany that their mind-numbing, totally biased, capitalistic news coverage is causing irreparable harm to the nation, by feeding divisive fodder to spur mindless, fact-empty behaviors, such as “tea parties” and “town hall meetings.” And, therefore, to realize that they can use their considerable media power base to develop true, fact-filled news. What a step to help return the nation to begin to embrace some common goals of fair play, decency and compassion!
For Brett Favre: To put the Minnesota Vikings management and fans through the same off-again, on-again retirement game that he did to Packers fans and the State of Wisconsin.
For Tiger Woods: To resolve never to leave his golf clubs within the grabbing distance of an angered wife! But, better yet, to never give a wife an excuse to use the clubs.
For Governor Jim Doyle (Wisconsin): To use his last year in office to continue and strengthen support for strong prevention programs in the areas of juvenile justice, family violence, child abuse and neglect and basic health.
For Mayor Tom Barrett (Milwaukee): To show the same guts and courage he demonstrated in coming to the rescue of a West Allis woman facing an angered violent young man last summer, so that he can to fend-off well-financed and certain-to-be nasty campaigning by his Republican opponent, the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce bunch, talk-show nuts and assorted rightwing goofs. If you do, Tom, you’ll disprove Leo Durocher’s famous quote that “Nice Guys finish last.” *See note below.
For friends, families and everyone: To overcome a tendency to become disgusted with the matters of the world and therefore to become “turned off” and become a recluse to resolving our problems. Let us continue to be committed to an appreciation that common decency and intelligence can help to steer us all to making for a better community in 2010 and the years to come.
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Now, my friends, maybe you have some resolutions you’d like to propose for others, or maybe you’d like to argue with mine. Let’s hear from you by commenting here.
Enough of making resolutions for everyone else. I see “Law and Order: Criminal Intent” is due on TNT in five minutes. Gotta go!
Happy New Year!
* Baseball manager Leo Durocher’s actual quote was: “”The nice guys are all over there. In seventh place.” Click here for more information.
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Take time this holiday season to enjoy memories of friends,
Some old and some new, fondly remembered for moments
Of joy and of enlightenment and of caring and of sweetness,
And let those memories brighten and freshen your spirit.Oh the sadness that has permeated these years of the 21st,
The unnecessary wars, the loss of jobs, the greed of the wealthy,
The duplicity of our leaders, the rancor and emptiness of arguments,
All while peoples find suffering and little to kindle a spark of hope.Except for you, my friend, and for you, and you, and you!
And for all the caring and marvelous folks in the world
In whose spirit and strength we find much hope in the New Year!
Warmest season’s greetings! -
Praise must go to Wisconsin State AFL-CIO President David Newby for braving the “Fair and Balanced” segment of Fox News on Thursday, Dec. 17.
Governor Jim Doyle’s signing of the bill to call for the state’s education standards to include labor history and collective bargaining has gathered some national attention; it may indeed be the first law of its type in any state.
Thus, it has become national news and Newby accepted an invitation to appear on the “Fox and Friends” morning show for a brief 4-minute session along with a misinformed opponent of the law, Michael Dean, of a rightwing group called First Freedoms. Newby knew it would be a gamble.
Needless to say, even the promo to the session framed the issue in a one-sided way. It asked, in effect: Do you want your tax dollars going to build propaganda on behalf of labor unions? Hardly an honest question.
The interviewer asked two questions, giving Dean the opportunity to answer first in each one, and in each case he permitted Dean to prattle on with his propaganda line using up minutes far beyond any “fair and balanced” measure would support. Each question misstated the facts, calling the law “a mandate” on schools (which it is not, since it calls for the state standards to included labor history but does not dictate how to teach it). Dean repeatedly called it a mandate, too.
After Dean’s one-sided, and totally fact-challenged tirade ended, Newby was given only 15 seconds to answer. All totalled, Dean had 127 seconds of time, more than twice as much as Newby had with 53 seconds. Such is “Fair and Balanced” as Fox sees it!
Given his limited time, Newby did an excellent job in summarizing the need to provide “balance” (real balance, that is, not the Fox kind) in the teaching about workers and their unions in the schools.
Great job, David! Perhaps there may be some “fair and balanced” listeners who will take time to learn about the issue more completely.
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My only personal regret: in awaiting David’s appearance, I had to listen to about 10 minutes of Fox News. Even that was too much torture to bear.I like to think I look at issues fairly (and truly do want to hear both sides), but Fox is so over the top in misstatements and lies and obvious bias, it’s just too much to handle before breakfast.
Judge for yourself if this interview was “Fair and Balanced,” by clicking here
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