"Tommie the Commie"

Tom McGrath was a poet from North Dakota who died in 1990. I interviewed him a few years before that in Minneapolis, where he was living in public housing in the Seward neighborhood. He was once called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose flunkies gave him the nickname, though he didn't say that he disliked it that I can recall: an old, tired, pessimistic, moral voice. He talked to me about his glum feelings about the USA, which in retrospect was better then. Watching Cheney and all these rotten guys made me think what he wrote in Remembering This Island:

In a dream as real as war

I see the vast stinking Pacific suddenly awash
Once more with bodies, landings on all beaches,
The bodies of dead and living gone back to appointed places,

A ten year old resurrection,
And myself once more in the scourging wind, waiting, waiting
While the rich oratory and the lying famous corrupt
Senators mine our lives for another war.

Almost like they planned it, part 1

Last month's agreement between Delphi Corporation and the United Auto Workers is really, really bad. In exchange for preserving current wages, benefits and employment for some union members, UAW gave away the store. Not like the union, threatened by a hostile bankruptcy court as well as threatened Chapter 11 for GM, really had a choice at this point. Delphi, which had 24,000 union employees in 2005, estimates they will have 2300 by 2012. Hourly wage, now around $27, will be $14 for new employees. Of course, no pension.

All this to enable Delphi to get out of bankruptcy, sort of. Following planned closings of four of its eight US plants, Delphi plans to "exit its core business." This isn't strictly true, of course: current CEO Robert S. Miller, Jr. has made a good business of buying companies, loading up with debt (tax-deductible), and gutting the pension plan, which these days passes for value-added, at least until you can sell the company again. Miller, when threatening bankruptcy in 2005, spoke about the company's "noncompetitive business structure."

That is, decent jobs. Which leaves the increasingly few companies that have living wages, health care coverage, a pension, and a union, even more "noncompetitive."

"The American people were, in the beginning, Revolutionaries and Tories. The American people ever since have been Revolutionaries and Tories regardless of the labels of the passed and present. Regardless of whether they were Federalists, Democrat-Republicans, Whigs, Know-Nothings, Free Soilers, Unionists or Confederates, Populists, Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, Communists, or Progressives. They have been and are profiteers and patriots. They have been and are conservatives, liberals, and radicals.

"The class of radicals, conservatives, and liberals which makes up America's political history opens the door to the most fundamental question of what is America? How do the people of America feel? It is in the feeling that the real story of America is written. There were and are a number of Americans -- few, to be sure -- filled with deep feeling for people. They know that people are the stuff that makes up the dream of democracy. These few were and are the American radicals and the only way that we can understand the American radicals is to understand what we mean by this feeling for and with people. Psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, and other learned students call this feeling "identification" and have elaborate and complicated explanations about what it means. For our purposes it boils down to the simple question, How do you feel about people?"

Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, 1946