We may have once believed that the darkest days were
behind us, and that slow and steady progress for middle-class workers
would continue to be made. But greed and good sense are forever in
competition. Gains made in our country's progressive years are, a
century later, once again in serious jeopardy.
1. The Commons: A Toll Gate in the Grand CanyonIn the early 1900s the
Grand Canyon had
been taken over by speculators, especially Ralph Henry Cameron, an
entrepreneur and soon-to-be Arizona Senator who laid claim to much of
the canyon land. He built a hotel on the main trail, set up a toll gate,
and even charged exorbitant prices for water at the steamy canyon
bottom.
We're heading back in that direction, and we don't have
Teddy Roosevelt to knock some sense into Congress. Attempts to privatize
federal land were made by the
Reagan administration in the 1980s and the Republican-controlled
Congress in the 1990s. In 2006, President Bush proposed
auctioning off 300,000 acres of national forest in 41 states. Paul Ryan's
Path to Prosperity has proposed to sell millions of acres of "unneeded federal land," and the libertarian
Cato Institute demands that our property be "allocated to the highest-value use." Representative Cliff Stearns recommended that we
"sell off some of our national parks." Mitt Romney
admitted that he didn't know "what the purpose is" of public lands.
2. Safety Deregulated: Workers Fell "Like a Living Torch to the Street"The
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in
New York City on March 25, 1911 was one of the deadliest tragedies in
U.S. history. 146 garment workers died, most of them young immigrant
women, some as young as 14. They worked from 9 to 14 hours a day, six
days a week, forced to keep up a pace of 50 stitches per second in the
preparation of blouses, all for 15 cents an hour. They were all on the
8th and 9th floors when the fire started near the end of
the Saturday work shift. Up on the 10th floor were Max Blanck and Isaac
Harris, the "Shirtwaist Kings."
The factory was not equipped for
safety. There were few government regulations in the early 1900s. Only
two exits existed: one quickly became blocked by smoke and flames, the
other was locked; the only man with a key ran off at the first hint of
fire. A few workers raced up the open stairway before it filled entirely
with smoke. Blanck and Harris also ran to the roof, without alerting
the 9th floor.
In the final minutes, as the elevator made its
final descent, the few fortunate women inside heard the impact of bodies
falling on the elevator roof. About twenty girls ran out to an
incomplete, poorly constructed fire escape, which collapsed under their
weight, hurling them all 100 feet to the sidewalk. A reporter wrote, "I
learned a new sound that day, a sound more horrible than description can
picture -- the thud of a speeding living body on a stone sidewalk."
At
some of the windows girls engulfed by flames joined in an embrace
before leaping to their deaths. In the words of a reporter, one girl who
was "screaming with clothes and hair ablaze, plunged like a living
torch to the street."
Blanck and Harris were acquitted of all
charges of manslaughter for blocking escape routes and ignoring simple
safety measures. They took their insurance money and faded into
obscurity.
A century later the attitude of big business is that
self-regulation works best. For the profit margin, it certainly does,
but not for workers. The Texas
fertilizer plant,
where 14 people were killed in an explosion and fire, was last
inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)
over 25 years ago. The U.S. Forest Service, stunned by the Prescott,
Arizona fire that killed 19, had been forced by the
sequester to cut 500 firefighters. The
rail disaster in Lac-Megantic, Quebec followed deregulation of Canadian railways. Other
examples include
a salmonella outbreak that was exacerbated by shoddy FDA oversight;
tainted syringes from a company that went two years without a federal
inspection; and a sudden increase in
coal miner deaths while the U.S. House was rejecting a proposal for safety measures.
3. Inequality: Workers Demand a 76-Hour Week in the Era of a $300 Billion ManA reader may have to look twice at the
photograph to believe the numbers. Barbers were demanding a shorter work day -- down to 12 hours, and 16 on Saturday.
A wage crisis exists today among fast food workers, who make about
$18,000 a year. According to the
Working Poor Families Project,
the income required for basic needs for a family of four is about
$45,000. A McDonalds worker would have to work 100 hours a week to reach
that level.
Far removed from the wage issue is individual wealth. During the time of the barbers strike, John D. Rockefeller, according to
Forbes,
had over $300 billion in today's dollars. Andrew Carnegie was right
behind him at $280 billion. Today we're approaching those Gilded Age
extremes again, with just 30 rich Americans owning as much as
HALF of the U.S. population (about $800 billion).
4. The 14th Amendment: It Worked for Slaves 6% of the Time, and for Corporations 94% of the TimeOn
July 28, 1868 the right of US-born slaves to full citizenship was
guaranteed by the adoption of the 14th Amendment. For a while conditions
improved for blacks. But sentiments were quickly changing, especially
among Supreme Court justices, whose corporate friends were beginning to
lay claim to what they deemed their fundamental rights as "persons." Of
307 14th Amendment cases brought before the highest court between 1890
and 1910, nineteen were
on behalf of blacks and all the rest (288 cases) in support of corporations.
Today the American people are again
under attack by
the Citizens United and Speechnow decisions, which allow unlimited
corporate campaign financing through independent "Super PAC"
organizations, and by the pending
McCutcheon v. FEC case, which would allow unlimited individual contributions. Meanwhile, we have people like
Mitt Romney assuring us that "Corporations are people, my friend."
Our
great shame is that we forget the past, or perhaps simply refuse to
learn from it. We have traveled this path before. We have seen the worst
of times for our most vulnerable citizens, for people who fought for
many years for modest gains, only to see the self-interest of a powerful
few whisk those gains away.
Paul Buchheit is a college
teacher, a writer for progressive publications, and the founder and
developer of social justice and educational websites
(UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org)
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