After Fifty Years More Questions About Capitalism

Last Saturday (February 8^th) a diverse coalition took their “Moral Monday” movement to the state capital in Raleigh, North Carolina. Grown to 30,000 from nearly a year of demonstrations involving the arrest of 900 North Carolinians, they protested  Republican actions that include refusal to expand Medicaid, imposing new photo ID voting requirements, and re-drawing district boundaries.

The North Carolinians marched to the familiar cadences of the faith-based civil rights protest era fifty years ago, but while the beat goes on Jericho’s walls remain.  [click on the URL in the right hand column to view the rally]

An awareness is growing on more and more people that it’s not the Republicans behind Jericho’s walls but our capitalist loyalties  that hold inequality in place.  Notice the “our.” From California Democratic leaders like Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsome—who gave Silicon Valley a free pass for exporting millions of jobs—to Kansas Tea Partiers, the heart of the American dream is to solve problems the capitalist way: by growing the economy instead of more fairly distributing it.  President Obama is expected to genuflect every day in this direction. 

Stale as accusations about capitalism may sound, on-going struggles coast-to-coast are freshly encoded with the search for policies that will bend our system to serve the basic dignity and needs of all people. The battle to raise the minimum wage, the battle to enforce the Volker rules in Dodd-Frank, the prosecutions of Wall Street fraud, and of course Bill Moyer’s broadcasts  are part of this rising tide.      

Old ideas like worker control or community ownership are coming back. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, workers at the Volkwagen plant are deciding this week whether to join the U.A.W. and  management is not opposing this for the interesting reason that it wants to see the plant adopt its successful German model of works councils and self-management. The company needs a UAW win in order to do this. According to the NY Times, Frank Fischer, Volkswagen local chief executive and chairman says

“worker councils” are a business model that helped to make Volkswagen the second-largest car company in the world. Our plant in Chattanooga has the opportunity to create a uniquely American works council, in which the company would be able to work cooperatively with our employees and ultimately their union representatives, if the employees decide they wish to be represented by a union.”

The Republicans are not only opposing this, but bringing in none other than Grover Norquist and his Washington-based lobbying  group,“Americans for Tax Reform.” In Tennessee Norquist has created a Center for Worker Freedom who’ve put up 13 billboards in Chattanooga, some calling the U.A.W. “United Obama Workers” and saying, “The UAW spends millions to elect liberal politicians.” Another billboard says, “Detroit: Brought to you by the U.A.W.,” and shows a photo of a Packard plant that was shuttered there 55 years ago.

Enjoining the battle may define what it means to be faithful.  But it may also mean developing the intellectual habit of courageous and critical thinking.  Some battles may be about dividing the spoils not helping the poor. In Memphis, where Dr. King was assassinated marching for sanitation workers’ low wages, the Kellogg company has locked out its workers in the hope of introducing a two tier wage system.  The union says Kellogg is asking for the right to employ up to 100 percent of the Memphis factory’s work force as temps or casuals — a lower tier that would earn around $22 an hour. The locked-out workers fear that if Kellogg wins the right to use as many casuals as it likes — the current contractual limit is 30 percent — then the company would somehow find a way to push out the longer-term workers, perhaps by preferring the casuals in assigning work schedules. [NY Times 2/11]

As usual, knowledge of these struggles is not widely distributed, but some of the groups that can provide a cure for this are the social justice units of Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim faith groups. In an internet age they have the capacity to provide thousands of study groups in local congregations with briefing and study materials, which could be entitled, “Why you and your children are getting poorer.”