Faced with widespread union busting and a feckless NLRB, a more aggressive labor movement is brewing.

The National Labor Relations Board has a long history of dysfunction, but its job just got a lot harder. In January, a federal appeals court ruled that Obama had illegally appointed three of the board’s members while the Senate was in recess early last year. Now, recess appointments are a touchy subject in Washington, but Obama had good reason. Republicans in the Senate had threatened to block any and all NLRB appointments, leaving the president with few options. (Oddly, there’s no law against deliberately obstructing a vital government agency.)

If the decision stands, the board is toast. With only one remaining member, the NLRB lacks a quorum, and legally loses all decision-making power. The bedrock of labor law enforcement would grind to a halt. What’s more, all decisions since the January 4 appointments last year could be nullified—that’s hundreds of rulings on everything from workers using social media, to who handles union dues on a day-to-day basis.

This is bad news for organized labor, but not as bad as you might think. While few doubt the board’s importance in protecting things the right to organize, the NLRB also has a long history of institutionalizing the bureaucracy and hierarchy that have plagued American labor for decades. The board was born during an era of historic labor militancy, and reforms that established basic workplace protections also went hand in hand with bans on more militant actions like sit-downs, sympathy strikes, and wildcats. In their place, the board set up channels like union elections and regulated negotiations. The new system was more predictable for everyone, but also more top-down, less democratic, and arguably much less effective for labor.

So, alienated by the rigidity and hierarchy of the NLRB system, many workers and organizers have begun learning to live without it, preferring to engage in struggles on their own terms. Indeed, with or without a functioning labor board, many of the movement’s brightest flashpoints are operating well outside the system.

One of the clearest of those flashpoints was certainly last year’s unprecedented organizing effort at Walmart, a grassroots campaign that united unions, labor groups, and activists across the country. The push began in September, when workers at a Walmart-controlled warehouse in Mira Loma, California, walked off the job and began a “Walmarch” to Los Angeles to demand safer working conditions. Earning well below a living wage, the Mira Loma workers had suffered 120-degree heat, inadequate ventilation, and broken equipment—conditions that lead more than 80 percent to experience on-the-job injuries. They were also mostly part-time workers, and often relied on a “buddy system” during slower workweeks.

The symbolism of the 50-mile march, inspired by the 1966 United Farm Workers march to Sacramento, was striking. Like the UFW, the warehouse workers found themselves excluded from the protection of the NLRB system—the UFW because the board explicitly excludes agricultural workers, the warehouse workers because of Walmart’s notorious (not to mention illegal) union-busting. But also like the UFW, where the warehouse workers lacked legal support, they found an outpouring of community reinforcement. During some of the march’s hottest days (with temps climbing above 100 degrees), volunteers set up impromptu clinics to provide health care to the mostly uninsured workers. A few days later, the warehouse workers were joined by more than 100 California farm workers as well as activists from Students Against Sweatshops, who marched alongside them in solidarity. By October 5, the marchers returned to work with a guarantee of better conditions.

That extraordinary victory soon galvanized Walmart workers in other states to more militant action. Within a couple of days of the Mira Loma strike, workers at a Walmart warehouse in Elwood, Illinois, presented a petition for safer conditions, consistent schedules, and an end to forced overtime. When supervisors began firing those who had signed, workers walked out. On October 1, hundreds of community activists joined the striking workers, where riot police arrived and arrested 17 protesters for civil disobedience. But like the workers in California, the Elwood strikers quickly won victories on core demands. By October 15, increasingly under the umbrella of the labor group OUR Walmart, actions had spread to a dozen cities nationwide.

Such early success had a lot to do with strategy, writes historian Staughton Lynd in December’s Industrial Worker. Although they relied on support from recognized unions like the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), their grievances, demands, tactics, and victories were entirely their own. At every step of the way, including the climactic Black Friday actions throughout the country, Walmart workers operated decidedly outside the NLRB system of petition and arbitration. Instead of channeling time and energy into the tedious process of requesting recognition and electing representatives to negotiate, workers in Mira Loma and Elwood decided collectively to organize and take action themselves. This direct action approach had a big impact.  

For one thing, it meant a much quicker process. Workers in Illinois and California organized, went public, and won concrete victories within a matter of weeks—an unheard of timeline for unions sticking with official channels. Eschewing official recognition also meant sidestepping legal restrictions like no-strike clauses and bans on civil disobedience, sympathy actions, and boycotts. In California, Illinois, and across the country, much of the campaign would’ve been difficult under the NLRB umbrella—from the “Walmarch” in California to the civil disobedience in Elwood, not to mention the spontaneous way it all took off.

But most importantly, workers took the company by surprise. For decades, Walmart has remained union-free by exposing and undermining union campaigns in whatever way it could. A 2007 Human Rights Watch report found that the company routinely breaks US labor law to snuff out labor actions, from spying on workers, to banning discussions of unions on company property, to firing those who join. The report added that because labor law in the US is so toothless, Walmart’s illegal conduct usually results in little more than a “slap on the wrist.”  

And if workers can somehow make it over these barriers and go public with their demands, retaliation can be swift. When organizing workers at a Quebec Walmart went public in 2005, the company pulled up roots and left. When a handful of Walmart meat-cutters in Jacksonville voted to join the UFCW in 2000, Walmart announced it was terminating meat-cutting operations in 700 stores. And like many big-box companies, Walmart’s managers have long been trained to put a stop to organizing efforts before they get off the ground. One “Manager’s Toolbox” from 1997 urges supervisors to be “constantly alert for efforts by a union to organize your associates.” It also gives instructions on curbing unionization at every step of the process, from initial organizing to petitions to elections and bargaining. The handbook even provides a “Union Hotline” to alert upper management at the first sign of trouble. Bottom line: Walmart knows the NLRB process very well, and how to subvert it.

Which is what made last fall so exciting. If workers in Mira Loma had circulated a petition, signed cards, or went public with demands, management would’ve been all over it. But there’s nothing in the “Manager’s Toolbox” about a Walmarch. This is what gives unofficial actions their power: instead of working through a process stacked against them, workers in Mira Loma, Elwood, and across the country took up the fight on their own terms. In so doing, Staughton Lynd argues, Walmart workers revived the tactics and strategy of the labor movement’s zenith—the heady decades before the NLRB put a lid on labor militancy in during the Depression.  

But as groundbreaking as these victories have been, they’ve not been alone. Workers in Mina Loma and Elwood are part of a growing trend in organized labor, one that relies more and more on decentralized, grassroots action outside the NLRB system—what the American Prospect’s Josh Eidelson calls “alt-labor.” It’s a method more radical unions like the Industrial Workers of the World have been pushing for a long time, and lately, it’s been catching on. Especially in big cities like New York, workers in traditionally unorganized sectors have started to organize in a different kind of way, and it’s led to more than a few concrete victories. From broad-based movements like Coalition to Immokalee Workers to local restaurants like Hot and Crusty, workers, particularly in food service, are winning critical victories by taking a more militant and creative approach to demanding their rights.

One of the most interesting approaches has been that of the Restaurant Opportunities Center, a radical labor group based in New York City. Like OUR Walmart, the ROC is not a formal union and has no desire to become one. Their strategy is a familiar one: direct action, unofficial strikes, and building community support for campaigns. Not only that, with a cadre of lawyers and worker advocates, the ROC helps educate workers on their rights, and when necessary, provides legal support against the industry’s worst offenders. It’s also adept at publicizing ongoing struggles. When food service workers win a victory on, say, overtime violations, like they did at Mario Batali’s Del Posto restaurant in Manhattan in 2012, the ROC labels them a “high road” establishment. To date, the ROC has won more than a dozen settlements against employers in New York City, along with millions of dollars in workers’ back-pay.

The ROC has been active in the New York area for more than a decade, but last year, they were joined by Fast Food Forward, a coalition of community groups and unions including the SEIU. Unlike OUR Walmart and the ROC, Fast Food Forward would eventually like to see their workers gain NLRB protection. But instead of petitioning for recognition and then entering into negotiations with employers, the group decided to take action in a more direct way. Less than a week after Black Friday, the group organized a mass walkout in New York to demand higher wages and greater labor protection. Workers pulled off the largest strike in fast food history before anyone even signed a union card.

Now, at first glance, the fast food strike doesn’t make a lot of sense. Historically, big unions like the SEIU have not been fans of acting outside the NRLB system. Even during the Depression, when wildcat actions and unofficial strikes broke out in hundreds of cities nationwide and labor’s power was at its height, large, established unions like the AFL and CIO urged moderation. The difference today, argues Labor Notes reporter Jenny Brown, is that the moderate strategy hasn’t worked. If labor was at its militant height in the 1930s, today it’s at an historic low. Faced with employers like Walmart that regularly violate the law to impede organization, and an NLRB system that offers few prospects for victory, some labor leaders have started to rethink and retool. The result has been a labor movement that is more grassroots, more democratic, and more about action.

And it seems to be working. The last few years have seen a wave of unprecedented achievements, often in industries long thought impossible to organize. Numbers are still small, but activists and strikers in New York, Mira Loma, and across the country have shown an energy and creativity that’s been hard to ignore. Whether supported by established unions or not, this new militant wing of organized labor has in many ways brought the movement back to its roots—rank and file workers, organizing themselves democratically to fight for their rights in direct and meaningful ways. If the campaigns spearheaded by OUR Walmart and the ROC can continue this trajectory, it will have much more to do with their unique vision and spirit than whatever ends up happening at the NLRB.

Above image, of a Fast Food Forward/Occupy/RiseUpNY day of action in July 2012, by Katie Moore. Used with permission.  

This post originally appeared at Waging Nonviolence.  

“We are standing up to live better,” say Walmart’s retail workers, playfully twisting Walmart’s slogan of “live better” into a rallying cry for better conditions and treatment. In a taste of what the nation’s largest retailer can expect on Black Friday, frustrated Walmart workers have again started walking off their jobs to protest their employer’s attempts to silence outspoken workers.

Workers from both the retail and warehouse sectors of Walmart’s supply chain have called for nation-wide protests, strikes and actions on, and leading up to, next Friday — the busiest shopping day of the year. In the past week, wildcat strikes in Dallas, Seattle and the Bay Area saw dozens of retail workers — from multiple store — walk away from their shifts, suggesting that the Black Friday threats are to be taken seriously.

Dan Schlademan, Director of the Making Change at Walmart campaign, said in a nation-wide conference call organized for media on Thursday that Walmart can expect more than 1,000 different protests, including strikes and rallies at Walmart stores between now and Black Friday.

According to organizers working with the Walmart retail workers’ association, OUR Walmart, stores around the country — including, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee, Washington D.C. and others — can expect workers to go on strike. Specific dates have not been announced yet out of concern to minimize chances for Walmart to preemptively silence workers’ voices.

“We are expecting a wide variety of activity — strikers right in front of their stores, demonstrations, flash mobs, rallies and people working to educate customers — I think it’s going to be a very creative day.” said Schlademan. “Brave strikers are seeing a huge amount of support from community allies.”

As Waging Nonviolence has previously reported, the historic wildcat strikes are invigorating a new form of labor organizing of non-union labor. By drawing on the support of community allies — particularly from religious and student groups — workers are finding it increasingly easier to resist their employer’s abuses.

In addition to joining striking workers at rallies at Walmart stores, supporters are able to donate to Making Change at Walmart to help the striking low-wage workers make up lost wages. In the form of food gift cards, the community support organization Making Change at Walmart is providing concrete ways for others to be in solidarity with Walmart’s workers. Thus far, $25,000 has been raised.

But this kind of grassroots support pales in comparison to the revenue and capital at Walmart’s disposal. Some Walmart executives are making upwards of $10 million a year while full-time retail workers struggle to make ends meet. Sara Gilbert, a customer service manager at a Seattle Walmart, makes only $14,000 a year to support her family.

“I work full time for one of the richest companies in the world and yet my children are on state healthcare and we get subsidized housing,” said Gilbert who joined other OUR Walmart associates in Seattle’s walkout on Thursday. Walmart posted almost $16 billion in profits last year and recently announced changes to employee healthcare premiums that could raise the cost for workers as much as 36 percent.

Also back in the struggle against Walmart are its warehouse workers. On November 14, the Inland Empire, Calif., warehouse workers — who are privately contracted through the logistics company NFI but move 100 percent Walmart goods — resumed their strike due to retaliations against outspoken workers. The workers were part of the 15-day strike in mid-September that re-ignited workers’ efforts to change Walmart’s treatment of its employees.

David Garcia, a warehouse worker from Southern California who took part in the first strike, was recently terminated for speaking out against unsafe working conditions and broken equipment. According to Elizabeth Brennan, an organizer with Warehouse Workers United with whom the NFI workers are affiliated, about three dozen workers have had their hours cut while others have been demoted and suspended in retaliatory efforts from Walmart’s contractor to curb organizing efforts.

“It’s been tough,” said Garcia. “My kids need food, school supplies and an apartment to sleep in at night, but right now it is difficult to provide them these basic things.”

On Thursday, six community supporters were arrested for blocking a major thoroughfare to the Walmart-contracted warehouse. The two dozen striking warehouse workers returned to work on November 16.

The Inland Empire strike, which still demands an end to unsafe working conditions, retaliatory practices and poor wages, comes during a crucial time when much of Walmart’s supply chain is moving into high gear. It remains unclear whether the strikes and walkouts will generate enough pressure to force Walmart to systematically change how it treats its 1.4 million employees, but the Walmart workers movement seems to be spreading and growing.

The Corporate Action Network is hosting online activism for supporters as well as publicizing some of the events planned at Walmart stores for Black Friday. While some activists for workers’ rights and just wages advocate boycotting Walmart and shopping on Black Friday in general, Making Change at Walmart has not called for boycotts but affirms all efforts that support workers’ rights to assemble and speak out.

Charlene Fletcher, a Walmart employee in California plans to go on strike to emphasize her message that Walmart is not listening to its workers. Fletcher and her husband both have to work Thanksgiving Day for Walmart and will miss spending the holiday with their two young children. Complaints have alleged that Walmart’s scheduling practices have made it very difficult for families to spend time with each other on holidays like Thanksgiving when Walmart plans to open its doors to shoppers that evening. Fletcher wants Walmart executives to know that Walmart’s employees are just as important as its customers.

“We are going to make the ultimate sacrifice,” said Fletcher who is also a part of OUR Walmart. “By going on strike on the busiest shopping day of the year, we hope to send a message out to Walmart that we are not a small percentage of workers who are struggling and that we mean business.”

Image by Walmart Corporate, licensed under Creative Commons.    

 

 

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And check out this video from OUR Walmart, "Why Are We Standing Up to Live Better?" 

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.

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As in 2004 and 2008, Rebecca Solnit and her blue-state henchwomen and men will probably invade northern Nevada on election week to swing with one of the most swinging states in the union. She is, however, much more excited about 350.org’s anti-oil-company campaign and the ten thousand faces of Occupy now changing the world. Rebecca Solnit is the author of 15 books, including two due out next year, and a regular contributor to TomDispatch.com . She lives in San Francisco, is from kindergarten to graduate school a product of the once-robust California public educational system, and her book A Paradise Built in Hell is the One City/One Book choice of the San Francisco Public Library this fall. She was named an Utne Visionary in 2010  

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In ancient China, the arrival of a new dynasty was accompanied by “the rectification of names,” a ceremony in which the sloppiness and erosion of meaning that had taken place under the previous dynasty were cleared up and language and its subjects correlated again. It was like a debt jubilee, only for meaning rather than money.

This was part of what made Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign so electrifying: he seemed like a man who spoke our language and called many if not all things by their true names. Whatever caused that season of clarity, once elected, Obama promptly sank into the stale, muffled, parallel-universe language wielded by most politicians, and has remained there ever since. Meanwhile, the far right has gotten as far as it has by mislabeling just about everything in our world -- a phenomenon which went supernova in this year of “legitimate rape,” “the apology tour,” and “job creators.”  Meanwhile, their fantasy version of economics keeps getting more fantastic. (Maybe there should be a rectification of numbers, too.)  

Let’s rectify some names ourselves. We often speak as though the source of so many of our problems is complex and even mysterious. I'm not sure it is. You can blame it all on greed: the refusal to do anything about climate change, the attempts by the .01% to destroy our democracy, the constant robbing of the poor, the resultant starving children, the war against most of what is beautiful on this Earth.

Calling lies "lies" and theft "theft" and violence "violence," loudly, clearly, and consistently, until truth becomes more than a bump in the road, is a powerful aspect of political activism. Much of the work around human rights begins with accurately and aggressively reframing the status quo as an outrage, whether it’s misogyny or racism or poisoning the environment. What protects an outrage are disguises, circumlocutions, and euphemisms -- “enhanced interrogation techniques” for torture, “collateral damage” for killing civilians, “the war on terror” for the war against you and me and our Bill of Rights.

Change the language and you’ve begun to change the reality or at least to open the status quo to question. Here is Confucius on the rectification of names:

“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”

So let’s start calling manifestations of greed by their true name. By greed, I mean the attempt of those who have plenty to get more, not the attempts of the rest of us to survive or lead a decent life. Look at the Waltons of Wal-Mart fame: the four main heirs are among the dozen richest people on the planet, each holding about $24 billion. Their wealth is equivalent to that of the bottom 40% of Americans. The corporation Sam Walton founded now employs 2.2 million workers, two-thirds of them in the U.S., and the great majority are poorly paid, intimidated, often underemployed people who routinely depend on government benefits to survive. You could call that Walton Family welfare -- a taxpayers' subsidy to their system. Strikes launched against Wal-Mart this summer and fall protested working conditions of astonishing barbarity -- warehouses that reach 120 degrees, a woman eight months pregnant forced to work at a brutal pace, commonplace exposure to pollutants, and the intimidation of those who attempted to organize or unionize.

You would think that $24,000,000,000 apiece would be enough, but the Walton family sits atop a machine intent upon brutalizing tens of millions of people -- the suppliers of Wal-Mart notorious for their abysmal working conditions, as well as the employees of the stores -- only to add to piles of wealth already obscenely vast. Of course, what we call corporations are, in fact, perpetual motion machines, set up to endlessly extract wealth (and leave slagheaps of poverty behind) no matter what. 

They are generally organized in such a way that the brutality that leads to wealth extraction is committed by subcontractors at a distance or described in euphemisms, so that the stockholders, board members, and senior executives never really have to know what’s being done in their names. And yet it is their job to know -- just as it is each of our jobs to know what systems feed us and exploit or defend us, and the job of writers, historians, and journalists to rectify the names for all these things.    

Groton to Moloch  

The most terrifying passage in whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg’s gripping book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers is not about his time in Vietnam, or his life as a fugitive after he released the Pentagon Papers. It’s about a 1969 dinnertime conversation with a co-worker in a swanky house in Pacific Palisades, California.  It took place right after Ellsberg and five of his colleagues had written a letter to the New York Times arguing for immediate withdrawal from the unwinnable, brutal war in Vietnam, and Ellsberg’s host said, “If I were willing to give up all this... if I were willing to renege on... my commitment to send my son to Groton... I would have signed the letter.”

In other words, his unnamed co-worker had weighed trying to prevent the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of people against the upper-middle-class perk of having his kid in a fancy prep school, and chosen the latter. The man who opted for Groton was, at least, someone who worked for what he had and who could imagine having painfully less. This is not true of the ultra-rich shaping the future of our planet.

They could send tens of thousands to Groton, buy more Renoirs and ranches, and still not exploit the poor or destroy the environment, but they’re as insatiable as they are ruthless. They are often celebrated in their aesthetic side effects: imposing mansions, cultural patronage, jewels, yachts.  But in many, maybe most, cases they got rich through something a lot uglier, and that ugliness is still ongoing. Rectifying the names would mean revealing the ugliness of the sources of their fortunes and the grotesque scale on which they contrive to amass them, rather than the gaudiness of the trinkets they buy with them. It would mean seeing and naming the destruction that is the corollary of most of this wealth creation.

A Storm Surge of Selfishness  

Where this matters most is climate change. Why have we done almost nothing over the past 25 years about what was then a terrifying threat and is now a present catastrophe? Because it was bad for quarterly returns and fossil-fuel portfolios. When posterity indicts our era, this will be the feeble answer for why we did so little -- that the rich and powerful with ties to the carbon-emitting industries have done everything in their power to prevent action on, or even recognition of, the problem. In this country in particular, they spent a fortune sowing doubt about the science of climate change and punishing politicians who brought the subject up. In this way have we gone through four “debates” and nearly a full election cycle with climate change unmentioned and unmentionable.

These three decades of refusing to respond have wasted crucial time. It’s as though you were prevented from putting out a fire until it was raging: now the tundra is thawing and Greenland’s ice shield is melting and nearly every natural system is disrupted, from the acidifying oceans to the erratic seasons to droughts, floods, heat waves, and wildfires, and the failure of crops. We can still respond, but the climate is changed; the damage we all spoke of, only a few years ago, as being in the future is here, now.

You can look at the chief executive officers of the oil corporations -- Chevron’s John Watson, for example, who received almost $25 million ($1.57 million in salary and the rest in “compensation”) in 2011 -- or their major shareholders. They can want for nothing. They’re so rich they could quit the game at any moment. When it comes to climate change, some of the wealthiest people in the world have weighed the fate of the Earth and every living thing on it for untold generations to come, the seasons and the harvests, this whole exquisite planet we evolved on, and they have come down on the side of more profit for themselves, the least needy people the world has ever seen.

Take those billionaire energy tycoons Charles and David Koch, who are all over American politics these days. They are spending tens of millions of dollars to defeat Obama, partly because he offends their conservative sensibilities, but also because he is less likely to be a completely devoted servant of their profit margins. He might, if we shout loud enough, rectify a few names.  Under pressure, he might even listen to the public or environmental groups, while Romney poses no such problem (and under a Romney administration they will probably make more back in tax cuts than they are gambling on his election).

Two years ago, the Koch brothers spent $1 million on California’s Proposition 23, an initiative written and put on the ballot by out-of-state oil companies to overturn our 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act. It lost by a landslide, but the Koch brothers have also invested a small fortune in spreading climate-change denial and sponsoring the Tea Party (which they can count on to oppose climate change regulation as big government or interference with free enterprise). This year they’re backing a California initiative to silence unions. They want nothing to stand in the way of corporate power and the exploitation of fossil fuels. Think of it as another kind of war, and consider the early casualties.   

As the Irish Timesput it in an editorial this summer:

"Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, hundreds of millions are struggling to adapt to their changing climate. In the last three years, we have seen 10 million people displaced by floods in Pakistan, 13 million face hunger in east Africa, and over 10 million in the Sahel region of Africa face starvation. Even those figures only scrape the surface. According to the Global Humanitarian Forum, headed up by former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan, climate change is responsible for 300,000 deaths a year and affects 300 million people annually. By 2030, the annual death toll related to climate change is expected to rise to 500,000 and the economic cost to rocket to $600 billion."

This coming year may see a dramatic increase in hunger due to rising food prices from crop failures, including this summer’s in the U.S. Midwest after a scorching drought in which the Mississippi River nearly ran dry and crops withered.

We need to talk about climate change as a war against nature, against the poor (especially the poor of Africa), and against the rest of us. There are casualties, there are deaths, and there is destruction, and it’s all mounting. Rectify the name, call it war. While we’re at it, take back the term “pro-life” to talk about those who are trying to save the lives of all the creatures suffering from the collapse of the complex systems on which plant and animal as well as human lives depend. The other side: “pro-death.”

The complex array of effects from climate change and their global distribution, as well as their scale and the science behind them makes it harder to talk about than almost anything else on Earth, but we should talk about it all the more because of that. And yes, the rest of us should do more, but what is the great obstacle those who have already tried to do so much invariably come up against? The oil corporations, the coal companies, the energy industry, its staggering financial clout, its swarms of lobbyists, and the politicians in its clutches. Those who benefit most from the status quo, I learned in studying disasters, are always the least willing to change.

The Doublespeak on Taxes  

I’m a Californian so I faced the current version of American greed early. Proposition 13, the initiative that froze property taxes and made it nearly impossible to raise taxes in our state, went into effect in 1978, two years before California’s former governor Ronald Reagan won the presidency, in part by catering to greed. Prop 13, as it came to be known, went into effect when California was still an affluent state with the best educational system in the world, including some of the top universities around, nearly free to in-staters all the way through graduate school. Tax cuts have trashed the state and that education system, and they are now doing the same to our country. The public sphere is to society what the biosphere is to life on earth: the space we live in together, and the attacks on them have parallels.

What are taxes? They are that portion of your income that you contribute to the common good. Most of us are unhappy with how they’re allocated -- though few outside the left talk about the fact that more than half of federal discretionary expenditures go to our gargantuan military, more money than is spent on the next 14 militaries combined. Ever since Reagan, the right has complained unceasingly about fantasy expenditures -- from that president’s “welfare queens” to Mitt Romney’s attack on Big Bird and PBS (which consumes .001% of federal expenditures).

As part of its religion of greed, the right invented a series of myths about where those taxes went, how paying them was the ultimate form of oppression, and what boons tax cuts were to bring us.  They then delivered the biggest tax cuts of all to those who already had a superfluity of money and weren’t going to pump the extra they got back into the economy. What they really were saying was that they wanted to hang onto every nickel, no matter how the public sphere was devastated, and that they really served the ultra-rich, over and over again, not the suckers who voted them into office.

Despite decades of cutting to the bone, they continue to promote tax cuts as if they had yet to happen. Their constant refrain is that we are too poor to feed the poor or educate the young or heal the sick, but the poverty isn’t monetary: it’s moral and emotional. Let’s rectify some more language: even at this moment, the United States remains the richest nation the world has ever seen, and California -- with the richest agricultural regions on the planet and a colossal high-tech boom still ongoing in Silicon Valley -- is loaded, too. Whatever its problems, the U.S. is still swimming in abundance, even if that abundance is divided up ever more unequally.

Really, there’s more than enough to feed every child well, to treat every sick person, to educate everyone well without saddling them with hideous debt, to support the arts, to protect the environment -- to produce, in short, a glorious society. The obstacle is greed. We could still make the sorts of changes climate change requires of us and become a very different nation without overwhelming pain. We would then lead somewhat different lives -- richer, not poorer, for most of us (in meaning, community, power, and hope). Because this culture of greed impoverishes all of us, it is, to call it by its true name, destruction.

Occupy the Names   

One of the great accomplishments of Occupy Wall Street was this rectification of names. Those who came together under that rubric named the greed, inequality, and injustice in our system; they made the brutality of debt and the subjugation of the debtors visible; they called out Wall Street’s crimes; they labeled the wealthiest among us the “1%,” those who have made a profession out of pumping great sums of our wealth upwards (quite a different kind of tax).  It was a label that made instant sense across much of the political spectrum. It was a good beginning. But there’s so much more to do.

Naming is only part of the work, but it’s a crucial first step. A doctor initially diagnoses, then treats; an activist or citizen must begin by describing what is wrong before acting. To do that well is to call things by their true names. Merely calling out these names is a beam of light powerful enough to send the destroyers it shines upon scurrying for cover like roaches. After that, you still need to name your vision, your plan, your hope, your dream of something better.

Names matter; language matters; truth matters. In this era when the mainstream media serve obfuscation and evasion more than anything else (except distraction), alternative media, social media, demonstrations in the streets, and conversations between friends are the refuges of truth, the places where we can begin to rectify the names. So start talking.

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Copyright 2012 Rebecca Solnit

Image by David Shankbone, licensed under Creative Commons.  

 

Not everyone would champion the arrival of a Walmart Supercenter in their town, but Joe R. Lansdale boldly argues in The Texas Observer that the mega-retailer isn’t all that bad. He tells the story of how his Texas town of Nacogdoches was revitalized when the regular Walmart was transformed into a Walmart Supercenter. Lansdale’s not advocating for child labor, unethical work practices, unfair wages, or outsourcing—he’s just in favor of convenience and practicality when it comes to small-town life. Here’s his take:

Let me tell you, the late downtowns in East Texas burgs were usually small stores run by locals. They generally priced things three times more than they were worth. Maybe they had to, but I don’t care. I don’t want to pay $30 for a hammer and a fistful of nails. If I wanted a banana, I had to go to another store. If I wanted to pick up a pair of shoes, another store.

If you worked, by the time you got off work, many of the stores were closed. Saturday, they might be open, but Sunday they were closed again. So for the working individual, the mother or father who had a kid wake up in the night with aching gums from teething, and you wanted something to make it all better, you had to wait until the next day.

With Walmart in town, lots of people can be put to work, far more than downtown ever employed. Someone has to run a 24-hour store, check people out, sack groceries, push carts, place stock, work at the McDonald’s sequestered in the back. The workers have all skin colors, not something I saw a lot of downtown, except for immigrants unloading trucks.

If you’re poor and barely making it, or even if your income is middle-of-the-road, it’s good to get what you need at slashed prices, anytime of the day, seven days a week, in a big, ugly, over-lit store that closes only on Christmas and half a day on Christmas Eve….now in our downtown are specialty stores that provide things we can’t get at Walmart, like maybe a stuffed deer head for that special place over the mantle.

Source: The Texas Observer

Image by jason.mundy, licensed under Creative Commons.