Quote:
Originally Posted by mr. compassionate
Basil, you need to realize the only reason unions exist is by benefit of the corporation.
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This is hogwash Revisionist history. Go take a history lesson from somebody other than Fox news. Or start here by
reading this essay from a fellow conservative Republican of yours, David Frum, who has jumped off the GOP ship of fools. It may help you to begin rubbing the disinformation crust off of your ears and eyes.
Quote from David Frum essay:
Quote:
Extremism and conflict make for bad politics but great TV. Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling.
But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy *errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action *phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”
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Mr C, I know you don't give a fuck about having a real history lesson (there is too much at stake for your identity), so this is for others who are interested in a more accurate understanding of history.
The reason unions exist goes back to the late-1800s and early 1900s. And understanding why worker's movements created unions to represent them requires a more holistic approach (holistic in the anthropological sense of the word, where the science-based study combines human biology, history, and the learned and shared patterns of human behavior and thought of past cultures).
And in actuality it would probably need to go back further to understand that the Adam Smith types, the emerging merchant class, were the progressives of their era. These people were "progressing" past the monarchy's and aristocracy's of their time. And the conservatives were the people who wanted the monarchy status quo to stay the same. Well, over the next century the new merchants (capitalists) began to create and consolidate their wealth, and ironically the old money monarchy began to intermingle with the new merchants. A great example of this was written about in George Orwell's essay, "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius"
Quote: "...the upper fringe of English society [1941] is still almost what it was in the mid-nineteenth century. After 1832 the old landowning aristocracy steadily lost power, but instead of disappearing or becoming a fossil they simply intermarried with the merchants, and soon turned them into accurate copies of themselves."
Now with that understanding of what many of the new merchants turned themselves into we can fast forward to the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Industrial Revolution created many many new things - Capitalism is a revolutionary force, and for all its good and all its bad it has simply lead to creating natural reactions to it. In the late 1800s many of the workers were born and raised in small villages and towns where the agrarian, artisan (craftsman) and peasant type cultures were their way of life. These agrarian, peasant, and craftsmen type of cultures were very much based on community solidarity, love of land, and the pride they carried in the crafts that they created.
So naturally when these types of people migrated to industrial centers to find work they found the new industrial working environments to be the dead opposite of the community type solidarity they were enculturated into. No longer was the craftsman proud of his work because he was just cog in the wheel of the massive industrial complex making huge profits for somebody else while being paid horrible wages and working in horrible conditions. In fact, many of the leading classical liberal thinkers understood what was going to happen. Wilhem von Humboldt said, "we may admire what [the worker does], but we despise what he is." And Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, "The art advances, the artisan recedes." To go even a step further with Tocqueville, before the workers movements really had taken a hold he wrote about the dangers of the "permanent inequality of conditions" by the "manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up under our eyes" and that this would eventually lead to the end democracy if it escaped its confines.
Anyway... this agrarian, artisan and peasant background created highly complex patterns of attitudes, values and tensions between the pre-industrial and industrial cultures. Understanding this is of crucial importance to explain their discontent with the conditions of the industrial world, and the reasons as to why workers movements began to organize and create unions. Even as late as the 1920s, American workers were still being recruited from small agrarian communities (American auto workers were being recruited from the Appalachian mountain regions). All of these workers were NOT hereditary industrial workers; they were still guided by their largely artisanal and peasant values, and NOT solely from an economic interest (profits-only guided focus) that capitalism would eventually imbue in the majority of people as time passed by.
In short, creating unions that represented the workers was a natural consequence of the effects that the industrial revolution had on the world at that time. The workers of the late 1800s and the early 1900s were a very special breed. Their thinking and understanding of the world, their affinity for community solidarity, the loss of their autonomy and craftsmanship lead to them finding ways to organize themselves against a system that was anathema to them.
That is why unions exist.
Now.... how and what they have currently evolved into is another story -- some unions have sold out the worker and others still represent the worker. The question I have to ask to all those people who are against unions: Why is it okay for the capitalist class to organize, but its not okay for the workers to organize? I am fine with BOTH the union and the corporation not being allowed to spend money on government officials and the electoral process, but I think it is fucking ludicrous to even suggest that workers should not be allowed to organize into one coherent voice to represent their interests in the work place. And by suggesting such a thing you unwittingly fuel the authoritarianism and totalitarianism type of mindset. I was hoping that this type of overt mindset was relegated only to the few ass-backwards nations that still exist, and not here in the U.S. I find it so strange that democracy is touted as the greatest thing on earth, and yet the idea of democracy in the work-place is regarded as anathema (after all, unions are essentially a form of democracy where peoples' voices are represented by an organized institution) I guess it just shows how fucking amazing the propaganda system works in this country. (did anybody see one Super Bowl commercial about the union that represents the athletes you all love and revere?) Shhhhh, be very very quiet... don't let the idea of democracy entering into the work place spread. It could have disastrous consequences for the owners of this society.
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