Right to Yacht Goes Wild

Inspired by the recent expansion of the Right to Work movement, Right to Yacht groups have been springing up across the nation, especially in the Right to Work states where yacht clubs are common.

Florida has seen the most Right to Yacht actions so far, but there have been also been Right to Yacht actions in Texas and Virginia, and preliminary Internet organizing and discussion in several other states, including Michigan. [See Limits on Unions Pass in Michigan].

In one Florida incident a yacht owned by a Miami area hedge fund owner was illicitly used for a party. Right to Yachters simply snuck by yacht club guards and had a party in the boat, emptying its liquor cabinet and "generally making a mess of it." The party goers snuck out before police or security guards became aware of the situation.

An Anonymous Right to Yacht person explained. "If you don't have to pay union dues to work in a unionized work place, why should you have to pay dues to get any privilege? Why should I have to pay yacht club fees to enjoy a yacht? Next time I'm taking a crew out into the bay."

According to postings on Internet bulletin boards, there are already two trends in the Right To Yacht movement. Some believe that only politicians who vote Right to Work laws, and their financial backers, should have their yachts targeted. These yachting excursions would take on the air of political protests against a specific law.

But the Eat the Rich trend seems to be more popular, at least in rhetoric. This trend seems to have a total disregard for the private property rights of the rich in general. They believe the rich deserve nothing they have grabbed. They talk of not just having floating parties, but of the right to take whatever they need from any rich person any time, from mansions to limousines to wallets. One online diatribe called for crowds to swoop into fancy restaurants and eat the food off the plates of the diners, calling it the Right to Eat.

Others talk of refusing to pay all forms of dues, rather than just union dues. Dues are a form of payment for a service. They want services without payment, just like workers who take advantage of the Right to Work laws to live like parasites. They even talk of creating homes for people without paying for permits or following building codes.

But the real purpose of the Right to Work laws is to keep wages and benefits unfairly low. In turn, this keeps profits high, and enables the business class to keep their yachts, mansions, and club memberships. What the people of America really need a way to Share the Wealth, and not just with the welfare class. It is the ordinary workers who get up in the morning and staff the stores, build the yachts, mansions, and malls, and do all the sundry things that allow us all to live who deserve better. They need more than the right to unionize. They need to get their share from what is owed to them for past labor, one way or another.

Check out the Internet for a Right to Yacht party near you, or Occupy a Michigan politician's home and see how they like it.

Rainy Day Wisconsin: Union Busting

Arnold Schwarzenegger, former actor and Governor of California, looks a lot better after a few months out of office. Partly that is because California does not look so bad, now that the problems of states like Texas, Wisconsin, and Illinois are more in the limelight. Mostly it is because the new fearless leader of California, and its same-old Democratic Party, Jerry Brown, is having to tell his party constituency pretty much the same thing Arnold did: there is no money. We have sucked the blood of the golden geese, the working taxpayers and productive businesses, to the point where we have to wait for a bit of recovery before we can throw more poly ticks into the mix

My heart bleeds for the public service workers of Wisconsin. Public service is a fine thing. I believe in the right of working people to form unions, too. But while Governor Scott Walker, is hell-bent on destroying every union, public and private (except ones that support the Republican Party, hint, hint), that does not mean I feel I need to defend every union, and every union action, no matter what the details.

If the United States, or the individual constituent states, were really based on democratic (rule by the people) principles, what would be the relationship of government to public employees? In a democracy should the public make decisions through its elected representatives, or should public employees be the real decision makers? Should public employees decide their own pay, working hours, and pensions?

What can be good in a private sector union can have negative consequences with public employee unions. Private sector unions provide a balance for ordinary workers against the power of corporations. That does not mean that corporations would always be wrong if they set pay scales without employee input; it does not mean that unions don't sometimes have their own problems, like internal corruption. But a union that asks too much of a business will destroy the business, and hence hurt its own members interests. Smart unions and smart corporations cooperate so that everyone is reasonably happy: stockholders, management, employees, and yes, even customers.

Public service unions can have some good effects. My own take (and I have served on a public school board, and have been observing these matters for decades now) is that some government employees are overpaid, and some underpaid, just like in private industry. Some are workhorses, and some are shirkers, just like in private industry.

The reason anti-union ideologues like Scott Walker make government worker unions the scapegoat for all unions, and for that matter all employees (seen by Walker as an inferior class of people who don't have the initiative to start a business or claw their way into management), is that our political system does sometimes allow particular unions of government employees to get out of control. The unions use campaign contributions and their ability to mobilize members to work on political campaigns to influence state legislatures. In return state budgets get distorted in two ways. Powerful unions (in California that would be police and prison guard unions) get a disproportionate share of the state budget allocated to them. And since each time a budget is done there is not enough money to go around (and that includes tax loopholes for the rich, and make work for well-connected corporations), the future gets mortgaged, usually in the form of promises of higher pensions.

What we need to fix the system is less ideology and more attention to detail. The every-man-for-himself Republican Party needs to stop acting as if every union (and every employee wanting a living wage) is bad and every government employee is an overpaid shirker. Liberal Democratic Party politicians need to stop acting as if every public employee demand for pay and benefit increases is legitimate. Some group of politicians needs to start working for the preservation of the bulk of employees whose only old-age pension is Social Security.

The job of a representative in a democracy is not just to pimp for powerful businessmen and powerful unions. The rest of us, the non-union workers and small business people, would like some representation too. We should all want good schools and good police and some sort of a safety net. None of us need a bloated military establishment or taxpayer subsidies to the rich or a pension system for highly-paid bureaucrats that no amount of taxation can sustain.

Public employee unions should retain their right to collective bargaining. Our elected officials, and the administrators who actually set salaries, need to be tough and fair negotiators. Unless you think the People they are stand-ins for are soft but unfair. Which might be right.

Humboldt County, Localization and Imperialism

Yesterday my dear friend Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, matriarch of Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County, posted this on Facebook: "At SBDC's Technology Bootcamp for biz owners and one of the 1st recommendations we're getting is to outsource and hire "virtual assistants" in India for $4/hr or Georgia for $8/hr. And bonus, they can be paid as contractors - so no benefits! Hmmmm."

I have complained about outsorcing in the past, and have actually had work I did, and got paid well for, outsourced to India. But since Kaitlin already expressed that outrage, I took it to the next level, commenting: "An Internet downside for U.S. workers for sure. After 65 years of being privileged workers inside an imperialist economy, we Americans are being tossed back into the international proletariat. Who woulda thought." Lots of other people left interesting comments too.

Of course, a person could offer their services in the $4 to $8 an hour range in Humboldt County. You can't be someone's employee at that scale, it violates the minimum wage laws, but you can freelance for as little as you want. And as long as you don't get sick or have a family to support, and know how to live very frugally, you can live on that scale even in the U.S. I know, I have done it, but I hope to never do that again.

American workers' share in the enjoyment and production of American wealth has had a complicated history. Indentured servants and African slaves obviously produced much but consumed little. The vastness of virgin lands "liberated" from Indian tribes meant family farms could do pretty well until about 1870. Then we had the period of robber capitalism until the Great Depression. A lot of people think the Democrats and New Deal paved the way for the Great Prosperity of 1940 to 1970, but a lot of variables were involved.

Americans forget, or do not know, that two of the world's most historically evil people, Adolf Hitler of Germany and Joseph Stalin of the U.S.S.R. (Russia), nevertheless deserve a lot of credit for ending the Great Depression. Because the U.S.S.R. was communist, its economy continued to grow through the 1930s. Germany had a very bad economic meltdown, which is one reason Hitler came to power, and he basically ordered everyone back to work, so Germany recovered from the Depression years ahead of the United States.

Then World War II came along. Germany destroyed Russia's factories. Their bombers tore up Great Britain pretty well too. German and American bombers destroyed Germany's factories. China was pretty well destroyed, and Japan's factories were bombed, in some cases vaporized, by the U.S.

Come 1946, almost all of the factory capacity of the world was in the United States, and a great deal of what was abroad was owned by American capitalists. Making wage concessions to union, or even non-union, workers in the U.S. was no big deal. Buy peace at home, extract wealth from abroad.

I believe that workers should share the wealth that they produce and that democratic government should be used to control the excesses of capitalism. In fact, I would prefer an anarcho-syndicalist social system, in which people work cooperatively and don't need much in the way of governance.

Localism posits that a healthy economy and society can be built up apart from the global economy and society. Certainly historically some areas have prospered and some areas have failed and most have been somewhere in the middle. So it is a gamble. Make yourself an island and maybe you can pay your workers $20 an hour for work that has a global scale of $4 per hour. On the other hand, you might be setting up a downward spiral towards being one of those places where people would be happy to get $1 an hour and not starve, rather than not working at all.

In 1700, China and India were the wealthiest nations in the world. Their highly paid artisans were reduced to poverty in the next two centuries as manufactured goods from Great Britain replaced local crafts. Today Chindia is rapidly become the world's most important economic region. Contrary to U.S. propaganda, that growth is not particularly fueled by exports. It is mainly fueled by infrastructure development and a growth in internal consumption.

Unionism in the U.S. failed for a variety of reasons, but the main one was that unions never took power from capitalists. Instead, using the profits from imperialism, the U.S. capitalist class bought off sectors of the U.S. workers with middle-class levels of pay. And in the case of AFL-CIO bureaucrats, upper-management levels of pay.

The times they are a changin. Worker pay relative to management and capitalist pay has been declining in the U.S., which should upgrade revolutionary potential. But culture usually lags, rather than leads, economics. Worker culture in the U.S. is mostly looking to a return of the glory days of 1940 to 1970, when you could get a good paycheck without becoming a radical or even joining a union. Unless the U.S. blows up everyone else's factories again, those days are not going to return. The workers' movement has to be based upon the new economic realities. A key question is: can it be a national struggle, a local struggle, or must it be an international struggle?

Review of The Fifties by David Halberstam

title: The Fifties
author: David Halberstam
publisher: Fawcett Columbine [hardcover], Ballantine Books [paperback]
year of publication: 1993
reviewed date: June 25, 2008
The Fifties at Amazon

David Halberstam's The Fifties is not a standard history. It does not start in January 1950 and end in December 1959. It does not dryly narrate wars and treaties and acts of Congress. Instead it tells historical stories that give insight into the events, politics, and culture of the 1950's. Many of the stories start in the 1940's or trail into the 1960's. Often the stories are deftly woven together, as when a story about a business turns into a story about politics.

I enjoyed reading about Estes Kefauver, the maverick Democrat who earned the party's wrath by investigating the party's close relationship with organized crime. I found the story of the creation of Holiday Inn by Kemmons Wilson quite enlightening, because it showed how people's lifestyles were changing. I don't like the McDonald's restaurant chain, but the story of its creation from a single drive-in restaurant in southern California was fascinating.

Then there are the choice quotations, including this from Stewart Alsop on the possibility of a Republican electoral victory in 1952: "We shall have a first-class fascist party in the United States if the Republicans don't win. The real need for a change in this country arises, not from the decay of the Democrats, but from the need to give the Republicans the sobering experience of responsibility."

Of course there is quite a bit too of famous political characters such as Harry Truman, "Ike" Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and the Kennedy brothers. There is much about Fidel Castro and a bit about Vietnam, stories that would become more important in the 1950's. Of course Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare are covered in some detail. The progress of the civil rights movement reminds us that the Republican Party was far more important to African-Americans obtaining civil rights than was the Democratic Party, at least until roughly 1965.

There is also a great deal about movie stars, particularly Marilyn Monroe. To me the story of Grace Metaliou, author of Peyton Place, was more compelling. The culture of the 1950's was much about facade. Peyton Place, more so than Elvis or On the Road or any other Beatnik fare, showed the sexuality that lurked beneath the surface of the American dream of suburbs, big cars, and well paid union jobs for all.

The prosperity of the 1950's was built on two pillars: unionization of the workforce and lack of international industrial competition. By forcing the manufacturers to share the wealth, the unions increased the wealth. Domestic consumption fueled demand, which fueled full employment, which made more profits for the rich to share. But World War II had destroyed most of the world's factories outside the United States. Eventually the dream would come to an end; but there was no end in sight (if you except the possibility of nuclear war) on December 31, 1959. No wonder everyone liked Ike.

The Fifties is an excellent book that should interest not just those who lived through the period, but everyone who has lived in its wake.