America as a Company Town
From Chris Hedges at Truthdig:
It is an old and cruel tactic in any company town. Reduce wages and benefits to subsistence level. Break unions. Gut social assistance programs. Buy and sell elected officials and judges. Fill the airwaves with mindless diversion and corporate propaganda. Pay off the press. Poison the soil, the air and the water to extract natural resources and leave behind a devastated wasteland. Plunge workers into debt. Leave them owing more on their houses than the structures are worth. Make sure the children will be burdened by tens of thousands of dollars lent to them for an education and will be unable to find decent jobs. Make sure that everything from hospital bills to car payments to credit card fees exact increasing pounds of flesh. And when workers stumble, when they cannot pay soaring interest rates, jack up rates further and deploy predators from debt collection agencies to harass the debtors and seize their assets. Then toss them away. Company towns all look the same. And we live in the biggest one on earth…
“It is freedom or death, and your children will be free,” Mother Jones told the miners. “We are not going to leave a slave class to the coming generation, and I want to say to you the next generation will not charge us for what we have done; they will charge and condemn us for what we have left undone.”…
All the gains, often paid for with the lives of working men and women, have now been reversed. We are back where we started. We must organize, resist and build movements. We must embrace radical politics and remain perpetually alienated from power or become a subjugated herd. I do not call for an emulation of this violence. But I do call for direct and sustained confrontation with all formal mechanisms of power, including the Democratic Party. The corporate state, for its part, should also remember the lesson from Blair Mountain. There are limits to how far a people can be pushed. And if violence continues to be the preferred mechanism for control, if the state refuses to institute rational economic and political reforms to address the growing misery that corporations inflict on the citizens, it will, as at Blair Mountain, engender a violent response.
Thank you for this link. I read all 3 pages. This story is very close to parts of my family and I heard it many times growing up. Sadly, too many seem to have forgotten the company towns be they the mill towns or the mining towns or even the sharecropping plantation on which my Daddy was raised and escaped from at 13 to fight in WW2 and later Korea because the Army offered more promise than life on the share.
Often, when riding my motorcycle I seek out the old mill towns and villages. As you well know, any river in the area is filled with them.Those are some of my favorite places to ride and I always ride through as slowly and quietly as possible as if my own baby was sleeping and I don’t want to wake him up. I often stop and listen for the cries of the people who once lived there. Sometimes, I almost think I hear them.
I’d appreciate it if you’d do the same when you ride by my house.
I really don’t like loud pipes on motorcycles. They make my head hurt and actually transmit more vibration to the rider. The first accessory I bought for my current bike was the quietest mufflers I could find then I added extra packing. Despite popular opinion, louder pipes really don’t increase horsepower at usable ranges. And if it were true that loud pipes save lives the government would mandate that all motorcycle exhausts face forward like big dumb horns. You’ll probably never notice me passing by. Someday I hope to own an electric motorcycle.
All previous references to riding past your house with no mufflers was purely in jest. I think too much of my classic machine to abuse it in that manner.