Participant Note on Rally in N.J.

by: Norman Markowitz Sunday 27 February 2011

I've just come back from the AFL-CIO led Solidarity rally for Wisconsin Public Employees  in Trenton, New Jersey.

There will be I hope significant media coverage of the rally, in which thousands attended in  very bad weather (pouring rain at points) to hear  Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO and trade union leaders from New Jersey and Wisconsin, along with Civil Rights leaders, call for negotiation rather than dictatorial legislation in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, and other states.

There were teachers and fireman, trade unionists representing public employees and private sector employees in the crowd. And there was a labor historian or two who I ran into.

What was important at least to me about the rally was the understanding in the crowd that we are all under the gun through the country--that, as one of the speakers said, Republican Governors were reading from the same script.  In New Jersey, there was particular anger at a Governor who keeps on using the phrase "class warfare,"  and has his own Monty Python version of the class struggle--there are two classes in New Jersey, he keeps on saying, the privileged  overpaid underworked public employees and the hard working tax payers they exploit.  But whether the rhetoric from Republican leaders is as smooth as a used car salesman or as Archie Bunkeresque as Christie of New Jersey, everyone understood at the rally  that the policy is the same across the country.

Which brings me to a point that wasn't really raised by speakers at the rally but was in the back of the minds of many in the crowd.  What is the federal government, meaning the administration, doing to stand with labor, to stand with the voters who elected it in 2008.

Isn't it the responsibility of the Obama administration to say to the people that labor had nothing to do with the deregulation over the last thirty years that sparked the stock market crisis of 2008; that labor opposed the "detaxation" of the same period which concentrated more and more wealth in the hands of the top 5 percent of income earners while the overwhelmingly majority of income earners saw their purchasing power decrease and the personal debt rise. 

There were Democratic politicians present at the rally but they didn't speak.  Democrats were praised by speakers for walking out of Republican dominated legislatures to block these draconian policies, but shouldn't we expect much more than them and the Obama administration than that. 

Perhaps the Obama administration might call for the federal government absorbing the budget deficits of those states which ended the cutbacks and began to invest in the people.  All of the budget deficits of the states taken together are a fraction of what the administration pumped into the banks, the corporations and wall street.  Isn't it time for the administration to begin to provide policies that seriously defend the interests of its core constituencies?

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  • We live in an age of great discomfort,controversy and conflict-class conflict.
    We have a president of the United States of America ,Barack Hussein Obama,who cites Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi the greatest human ever,but rejects his peaceful human actions and inactions on earth.
    We have an army of Governors,who are more concerned with the "fiscal responsibility"of busting unions and social movements for progress than the physical hunger,homelessness,and economic devastation of decades of genocide against workers in general,women workers and their children,especially those of color these bear,in particular.
    That union pensions,housing,education,food and clothing and the denial thereof to workers have nothing to do with"fiscal responsibility"-in fact,this very denial is the CAUSE of economic devastation,not the remedy for it.
    The "general strike" which finance capital has visited upon the whole working people in the United States,choking states' Capitals and Capitols,drying banks,businesses,pensions,services,people programs,bond generating power,food programs,infant nutrition programs-and let's not forget jobs,in millions of ways,goes almost unnoticed in our mainstream media.
    We have to challenge power,that of finance capital,to get at the real CAUSE of our fiscal crises,across our states.
    We have to coalesce with the Obama administration now,as has naturally and spontaneously started,in a direct and conscious way,to break this general strike of big business,an effort to increase wage,salary and physical slavery of workers in the United States of America.
    We need our own monies freed to save our state budgets and social programs to correct decades of abuse by the rich and super rich,whose riches have come from our spilled blood-from the exploitation of our labor,our parents,grands and greats.
    We need our Federal government.
    We cannot agree with historian Markowitz more that this is the reason for our Federal government and the reason why we elected our administration.
    We know why Obama cites Gandhi.
    There will be no peace in state Capitals as long as Wall Street rulers abort MLK's War on Poverty to a literal war on the poor,exploited and oppressed,for bloody profit and genocide.

    Posted by peaceapplause, 02/28/2011 6:43am (14 years ago)

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