Two Vocabulary Questions

1. Why has the word “militant” only been used to describe workers and unions and never to describe employers, even when they've used armed force against unarmed workers?

2. Why is the word “conservative” used to describe right wing groups seeking to break down long-established and necessary institutions?

Property Rights Have An Ugly Past

If you ever thought slavery was un-American you probably should read this. Slavery is one of the foundation stones of the American mindset, particularly the modern mindset.

In the present capitalist mindset there's a growing entitlement that includes imagined or projected profit, and when such profit is challenged today's capitalists look on it as theft of property, even though the property or profit hadn't been possessed yet. What this does is pit workers' expectations against the expectations of people who own for a living, and we know which side has the litigious power and flexibility to shape the law. Working people are entering a hostile future that's likely to turn their jobs into an obligation and render their rights negligible.

In a justice system that prefers property rights above human rights, and owners' rights above workers’ rights, we are seeing the establishment of law that will be hard to overturn, not only precedent preferring the owning side of any argument, but the overturning of precedent that upholds the worker’s side. Law is never more conservative than when it is radical. Even during the broad prosperity following the progressive era and the New Deal, property was sacred, which meant that property “earned” previously under suspicious conditions, through slavery or theft of land from native Americans or railroad fraud or the underpaid employment of masses of immigrants, was protected by the law. If you were to look at the histories of many of the great fortunes in this country you’d probably agree that inheritance is a very efficient form of money laundering. Inheritance is the preferred means of gaining wealth in this country, preferred by the Republicans certainly, who think getting millions from daddy is holier than working for it, more deserving of tax protection anyway.

This weirdly un-American mindset that feels contempt for working people and worships the ownership class is actually very American. It comes down to us from the age of slavery, when great fortunes were made both North and South because working didn’t entitle you to anything. This is how the Republicans have had such an easy time turning the word “entitlement" into a slur. If you are entitled to anything you already own it; that’s what they say. Having to work for it negates the right you are claiming.

The West Virginia mining country is our ugly past and our ugly future

Poverty hasn’t come back in West Virginia because the War on Poverty failed. It’s back because the Republican Party worked for the past 30 years to repeal everything FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, and yes even Nixon put in place to make lives better for working people in America. The Republican Party decided their sole clients were the very rich. Oh they paid lip service to the white racist vote, but most of the Republican policies were directed at depriving and disempowering all working people, white, black, Hispanic, everyone who worked for a paycheck. The Republican Party has diminished the lives and reduced the power of everyone who works for a living and enhanced and protected the wealth and the power of people who own for a living.

Here's an article from today's New York Times that discusses how hopeless lives are in West Virginia.

This is what the bad old days looked like before the progressives (Republicans and Democrats both) wrote workers’ rights into law. An ugly violent world of private corporate armies that prevented workers from organizing or demanding their rights. Few Americans have ever heard of the Ludlow massacre.

Why? Mostly because textbook companies don't dare offend the wealthy who perpetrated this horrible crime. Life was awful for working people a hundred years ago.

The mining companies owned not only the jobs but the houses miners lived in and the stores they were forced to shop in. When miners in Colorado tried to unionize the mining billionaire John D. Rockefeller Jr. sent in hired thugs who burned the miners out of their camp and then mowed them down with machine guns when they tried to escape the flames. It changed how Americans saw the working poor.

This is the future the 1% want. This is the future that the Republican Party is determined to give us. Rich and poor divided, with very few living a middle class life.

Why are unions and workers the only ones ever labelled "militant"?

We were discussing a certain local union the other evening and the word "militant" was very quickly applied. I had a hard time visualizing these people with axe handles. Seriously. Elementary school teachers militant? I can't even imagine high school teachers raising their voices. Militant? It's ridiculous. Stubborn, maybe. Determined. Possibly strident, aggressive, assertive, even unreasonable. Militant? No. But the term is useful because it automatically stigmatizes the labor side of any disagreement.

Strange how the word militant is always applied to the labor side of the dispute and only to the labor side. Whether there is anything remotely violent or militaristic about the union behavior. But the label "militant" automatically alienates anyone reading about the dispute because it implies violence.

History paints a vivid picture of organized violence directed by employers against workers. It was the owners' side which sent in armed Pinkertons and the National Guard and armed street thugs in the early days, who infiltrated organizing efforts, fired, blackballed and otherwise intimidated workers trying to form unions, etc. In Colorado and Chicago and the Appalachian and western coal fields it was striking miners who were shot down and killed in the hundreds. But it's only workers who are labelled "militant". Hired armies, sometimes uniformed, sent to intimidate workers trying to organize were never called "militant". Why?

There is the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado where a tent city of coal workers and their families was attacked for 14 hours by hired police with bombs and machine guns. Militant?

There was the Memorial Day Massacre in 1937, when unarmed steelworkers and their families were gunned down by Chicago police after attending a rally on the south side. Militant?

The history of official police in this country begins with gangs of vigilantes sent out to discourage uprisings (the perpetual fear of the minority white population who lived off slave labor) and to hunt down fugitive slaves but also to intimidate the slave population who might just be thinking of escaping or might "need a little encouragement" to work harder. Sometimes it was simply sport.

The term "militant" stems from the word "militia" which was regularly applied to both ad hoc and official band or posses of armed uniformed men organized for the purpose of intimidating the low paid and unpaid and slave workers who always outnumbered their employers. But "militant" is never applied to the employer side in a labor dispute. Why?

Today, the most dangerous subversive organizations in America tend to be well-armed white right-wing groups who adopt the label of "militia" or "posse", but militant is seldom applied to the rightward side of the political spectrum, just as little attention and very little news coverage is directed there. Why?

To this day, "militant" is an adjective blithely, unquestioningly, automatically attached to nonmilitant and nonviolent workers. Workers who have the nerve to ask for more and seem determined to get it. Often they are receiving as little as their employer can get away with paying them, so this more they are asking for is ordinary fairness. And the determination they show towards gaining satisfaction is usually proportionate to the patience they've shown waiting to receive fairness. Fairness is seldom offered willingly, but that recalcitrance by management is never called militant. Why?

We've been reading about the Minnesota Orchestra lockout. Which side is more "militant" here? Certainly the orchestra management is more militant than the violinists and cellists. A lockout is far more militant behavior than anything the players have demonstrated, but militant is never applied to management. Why?

We can call the owners' side selfish, arrogant, greedy. (Although the word "greedy" is usually applied to workers who tend to earn a lot less than the people they are negotiating with. These days workers who are working several jobs to patch together less than a living wage are routinely called greedy.) But we don't call the owner/management side of any labor disagreement "militant". Why? Does it violate the Chicago Style Book? Did Strunk and White outlaw this usage?

Why does militant always apply only to the side of the underclass, usually in cases where there is no whiff of violence, no threat of violence, no suggestion "if we don't get this we might do that", not even implied violence. Why not use the word "firm" or "resolute" or "stubborn" or "uncompromising"? Militant is always the label, and we are instructed to visualize muscular angry men with axe handles and burning torches.

Why do we even picture axe handles? There's a history there. In Pennsylvania in 1877, mine workers trying to organize were confronted by state police augmented by hired thugs armed with pick and axe handles. Violent mobs that were sent out to intimidate blacks trying to assert their rights in the South were often armed with axe handles. Where did you get a sufficient supply of axe handles? From factories producing axes and axe handles. Supplies of uniform weaponry were always on the side of management and authority. But it has always been workers who are labelled militant. Why? Why are we obediently following the same bias today?