Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
In America, Labor Has an Unusually Long Fuse
Steven Greenhouse, New York Times
The workers and other protesters who gathered en masse at the Group of 20 summit meeting last week in London were continuing a time-honored European tradition of taking their grievances into the streets.
Two weeks earlier, more than a million workers in France demonstrated against layoffs and the government’s handling of the economic crisis, and in the last month alone, French workers took their bosses hostage four times in various labor disputes.
… But in the United States, where G.M. plans its biggest layoffs, union members have seemed passive in comparison. They may yell at the television news, but that’s about all. Unlike their European counterparts, American workers have largely stayed off the streets, even as unemployment soars and companies cut wages and benefits.
The country of Mother Jones, John L. Lewis and Walter Reuther certainly has had a rich and sometimes militant history of labor protest — from the Homestead Steel Works strike against Andrew Carnegie in 1892 to the auto workers’ sit-down strikes of the 1930s and the 67-day walkout by 400,000 G.M. workers in 1970.
But in recent decades, American workers have increasingly steered clear of such militancy, for reasons that range from fear of having their jobs shipped overseas to their self-image as full-fledged members of the middle class, with all its trappings and aspirations.
David Kennedy, a Stanford historian and author of “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945,” says that America’s individualist streak is a major reason for this reluctance to take to the streets. Citing a 1940 study by the social psychologist Mirra Komarovsky, he said her interviews of the Depression-era unemployed found “the psychological reaction was to feel guilty and ashamed, that they had failed personally.”
(4 April 2009)
European workers rebel as G-20 looms
Jason Walsh, Christian Science Monitor
As world leaders meet at the Group of 20 summit in London, Europeans are taking militant actions to protect their jobs, pointing to a growing anger – and willingness to act on it – among workers in the European Union.
In the latest such move, staff at US automotive-parts manufacturer Visteon in Northern Ireland occupied a factory.
The timing couldn’t be worse for world leaders. With the G-20 summit bringing together heads of government, including President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a rise in militancy could undermine already shaky negotiations over how best to address the global financial crisis.
British unions took to the streets of London over the weekend as part of a demonstration calling for G-20 leaders to protect workers. More protests erupted Wednesday as G-20 leaders arrived.
(1 April 2009)
Bageant: We’ve Let Corporations and Media Rob Our Souls — It’s Time to Do Something Meaningful
Joe Bageant, AlterNet
The most chilling accomplishment of American capitalist culture is that we have commodified our own consciousness.
The following text is drawn from a series of recent speeches delivered by Joe Bageant, including the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago.
I just returned from several months in Central America. And the day I returned I had iguana eggs for breakfast, airline pretzels for lunch and a $7 shot of Jack Daniels for dinner at the Houston Airport, where I spent two hours listening to a Christian religious fanatic tell about Obama running a worldwide child porn ring out of the White House. Entering the country shoeless through airport homeland security, holding up my pants because they don’t let old men wear suspenders through security, well, I knew I was back home in the land of the free.
Anyway, here I am with you good people asking myself the first logical question: What the hell is a redneck writer supposed to say to a prestigious school of psychology? Why of all places am I here? It is intimidating as hell. But as Janna Henning and Sharrod Taylor here have reassured me that all I need to do is talk about is what I write about. And what I write about is Americans, and why we think and behave the way we so. To do that here today I am forced to talk about three things — corporations, television and human spirituality.
No matter how smart we may think we are, the larger world cannot and does not exist for most of us in this room, except through media and maybe through the shallow experience of tourism, or in the minority instance, we may know of it through higher education. The world however, is not a cultural history course, a National Geographic special or recreational destination. It is a real place with many fast-developing disasters, economic and ecological collapse being just two. The more aware among us grasp that there is much at stake. Yet, even the most informed and educated Americans have cultural conditioning working against them round the clock.
As psych students, most of you understand that there is no way you can escape being conditioned by your society, one way or another. You are as conditioned as any trained chicken in a carnival. So am I. When we go to the ATM machine and punch the buttons to make cash fall out, we are doing the same thing as the chickens that peck the colored buttons make corn drop from the feeder. You will not do a single thing today, tomorrow or the next day that you have not been generally indoctrinated and deeply conditioned to do — mostly along class lines.
For instance, as university students, you are among the 20% or so of Americans indoctrinated and conditioned to be the administrating and operating class of the American Empire in some form or another. In the business of managing the other 75% in innumerable ways. Psychologists, teachers, lawyers, social workers, doctors, accountants, sociologists, mental health workers, clergy — all are in the business of coordinating and managing the greater mass of working class citizenry by the Empire’s approved methods, and toward the same end: Maximum profitability for a corporate based state.
(6 April 2009)
The killing-fields of inequality
Göran Therborn, Open Democracy
The evidence that unequal societies inflict great damage to the life and health of their citizens is clear. Why does it matter and what can be done? Göran Therborn thinks big.
—
here are at least three quite different kinds of inequality, and they are all destructive of human lives and of human societies.
The first is inequality of health and death, what might be called vital inequality. Here, hard evidence is accumulating that health and longevity are distributed with a clearly discernible social regularity. Children in poor countries and poor classes die more often before the age of 1, and between the age of 1 and 5, than children in rich countries and rich classes. Low-status people in Britain die more often before retirement age than high-status people. Vital inequality, which can be measured relatively easily through life-expectancy and survival rates, destroys millions of human lives in the world every year.
The second is existential inequality, which hits the individual as a person. This kind of inequality restricts the freedom of action of certain categories of persons, for instance that of women and other marginalised groups in public spaces and spheres. This form of inequality means denial of (equal) recognition and respect, and is a potent generator of humiliations – for women in patriarchal societies, for indigenous groups in the Americas, for poor immigrants, for those of low caste, and for black people or stigmatised ethnic groups. It is important to note here that existential inequality does not only take the form of blatant discrimination; it also operates effectively through more subtle status hierarchies.
The third is material or resource inequality, which means that human actors have very different resources to draw upon. There are in turn two aspects here. The first is access to education, to career-tracks, to social contacts, to what is called “social capital” (in conventional discussions, this is often referred to as “inequality of opportunity”). The second is inequality of rewards (often referred to as “inequality of outcome”. The latter is the most frequently used measure of inequality – the distribution of income, and sometimes also of wealth.
… The paradox of distance
The final mechanism of inequality, distantiation, is the most subtle of all: the mechanism or channel most difficult to pin down morally and politically. This is in part because it reveals a paradox of the age: in travel and technology, distances have shrunk enormously; yet in income and social indicators, distances are increasing both across the world and within many (if not all) countries.
… Why is economic distance widening?
There seem to be two major processes at work. The first is the extension of solvent markets, which has increased both the pool of rewards and the competition for star talent. Three aspects of this – the lifting of controls on capital movements in the 1980s, the expansion of transnational investment, and the emergence of a global executive and professional market – have had the result of catapulting a small business elite upwards. A similar phenomenon has occurred in the arenas of sports and entertainments.
The second process is the increasing autonomy of financial capitalism from what is still called the “real economy”.
… Inequality, so what?
Even those who accept that inequality is a fact and is increasing might respond: so what? Why does it matter? It matters because inequality is a violation of human rights.
… A growing social distance diminishes social cohesion. This in turn means more collective problems such as crime and violence, and fewer resources for solving problems like global warming.
Göran Therborn is professor of sociology at Cambridge University. He is editor and co-author of Inequalities of the World: New Theoretical Frameworks, Multiple Empirical Approaches (Verso, 2006).
(6 April 2009)
