Sticking to Our Guns

From William Lucy, International Secretary-Treasurer

Have you noticed how often Americans have to be reminded not to forget? Remember the Alamo! Remember the Maine! Remember Pearl Harbor! And don’t forget to take out the garbage.

In other places—Ireland, The Balkans, Japan—things that happened hundreds of years ago are still hot news. In America, what happened yesterday tends to be forgotten by next week. I think the problem is that America has the shortest memory. Andy Warhol understood that when he calculated that celebrity lasts for about 15 minutes.

Ronald Reagan is our greatest example of collective amnesia. Reagan had an uncomplicated mind. A very uncomplicated mind. This is good. That is bad. But most Americans have forgotten or maybe never ever got the point that Reagan’s simplistic thinking put the country in the hole to the tune of $4 trillion, and that debt is the weapon that the right-wing is using to attack Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, aid for college tuition, training for the jobless, food for poor children, and much else.

There’s something else about Reagan that the public has all but forgotten. He obliviously presided over the most corrupt administration in modern times; many of his high-level appointees were indicted and went to prison like bananas, in bunches.

They had forgotten, or maybe they just didn’t care, that practices that are almost routine in the business world—conflicts of interest, the use of insider information, manipulation of policy for personal gain—are illegal in the public sector. (If you need to freshen up on business ethics, read the Wall Street Journal on any day.) Virtually every convicted scoundrel entered a cell with the abiding conviction that he or she had done nothing wrong.

Most of these people came from the business world, and most confused government with business. We’ve heard them say a thousand times, “Government ought to be run like a business.” It had never occurred to them that public service and practices common in private business are totally different propositions. Business exists to turn a buck for the investors, and to hell with everything else. Government is supposed to foster the well-being of everyone—rich and poor, young and old, sick and well—the works. Now these people control the Congress, and in less than a year they have converted it into an ethical cesspool.

No single member better personifies what’s happening than the man who is running the show, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich of Georgia. He tells lobbyists, “If you want to play in our revolution, you’ll have to live by our rules”; in plainer words, if you want what we’ve got, you’ve got to pay for it. He makes sure his lieutenants are checking all ticket stubs.

Ways and Means members warn corporations not to give to Democrats. The GOP Whip keeps a book of names and amounts; if the amount after your name isn’t big enough, he tells you. Leaders of the Senate Banking Committee delay action on bank deregulation to allow more time to milk banks for contributions. A representative of Alaska, who owns a chunk of a paper company, pushes a bill to clear cut forests.

Then there’s our Congressperson from Utah, who up until recently was Gingrich’s poster girl for family values. Until it became known that she has a habit of stiffing landlords and jewelers, and still doesn’t have a clue where that $1.8 million came from that she used to buy her election. Anyway, it’s all her husband’s fault.

The Gingrich congress and its hardline policies once again have tilted the playing field, tilted it in favor of the already rich and wealthy and corporate America. Often these are the same people.

There is no money for training and retraining. Yet workers by the hundreds of thousands are losing their jobs and being told to find new careers. There is no money for infrastructure, yet our sewers and water systems, bridges and local highways are in a state of disrepair. There is no money for health and safety, yet thousands of workers are killed or injured on the job.

As more and more cuts are imposed and more and more services deteriorate we only hear the slogans of old—contract out, downsize, privatize—none of which provides a solution. The answer lies in partnerships to provide effective services. Our union now and in the future remains committed to this principle.