Decades after Pullman, ‘general strikes’ could return

Bill Knight column for 8-15, 16 or 17, 2019

This summer 125 years ago, about 1,000 troops moved from Fort Sheridan in Chicago to the company town of Pullman on the city’s southeast side to enforce a court ruling to stop a nationwide strike tied to that company because it interfered with the U.S. mail.

In the following weeks, soldiers, company thugs and scabs eventually got trains going again, and then the government arrested, tried, convicted and imprisoned Eugene Debs of the American Railway Union (ARU) and others for “ordering, directing, aiding, assisting, or abetting” the work stoppage, now remembered as the Great Pullman Strike.

The month-long fight was preceded by weeks of organizing and became the country’s largest general strike and a significant demonstration of union strength, involving up to 250,000 people in dozens of states.

Besides Pullman workers, its had workers from many companies and communities ensuring that railroads west of Detroit were halted since strikers either refused to touch Pullman’s cars or just uncoupled them from trains, stranding passengers and leading to increased food prices and shortages of resources for factories, power plants and other businesses.

Today, the idea of such a sympathy strike is gaining traction.

“Look at how unions banded together during the Pullman Strike,” said Association of Flight Attendants president Sara Nelson. “The president of the Chicago Federation of Labor said at the time. ‘We all feel that in fighting any battle against the Pullman Company, we’re aiming at the very head and front of monopoly and plutocracy.’

“This is again a time when people have a growing consciousness of the ruling class and those with an insatiable need for more money, power and control,” Nelson added. “Working people are just now understanding the power they have when they stand together and claim our share of the profits we create.”

In the “Gilded Age,” from the 1870s to the turn of the 20^th century, industrialists made enormous profits and dominated the labor force (and politicians). It was a time of economic chaos, too, with frequent crashes, and in 1893 the country fell into a depression. But tycoon George Pullman – who amassed great wealth by monopolizing fancy train cars for the rich – maintained stockholder dividends by slashing workers’ pay but not cutting their rents. (Five years earlier, Pullman bought thousands of marginal acres by Lake Calumet and built his factories and also an industrial version of a coal camp, with hundreds of houses rented to many of his 10,000 workers, along with company stores, a school and other features of a “company town” where he was landlord as well as boss.)

It was illegal to unionize then, but dozens of workers organized into a committee to ask that wages be restored and rents reduced. Pullman refused, and on May 12, 1894, thousands of Pullman workers walked off the job. Debs’ emerging ARU starting helping, having won the Great Northern Railroad strike the year before.

“The forces of labor must unite,” Debs told the ARU convention that June 12. “The dividing lines must grow dimmer day by day until they become imperceptible, and then labor’s hosts, marshaled under one conquering banner, shall march together, vote together, and fight together until workingmen shall receive and enjoy all their fruits of their toil.”

The ARU voted to boycott Pullman cars, and two weeks later the sympathy strike officially began on June 26, lasting until armed troops, police and National Guardsmen confronted unarmed strikers, provoking riots and attacking workers. Train cars were destroyed; more than 20 strikers or supporters were killed.

After the strike ended that Aug. 2, President Grover Cleveland named a committee to determine the strike’s causes. Its report blamed Pullman.

Most sympathy strikes and union boycotts are now prohibited by law, so they’re rare. However, the flight attendants union’s threat of such a walkout during Trump’s government shutdown, and recent teachers strikes from coast to coast, show that mass solidarity can still be powerful. Nelson said her call for a general strike had an effect in January. Some air traffic controllers called in sick, Nelson publicly warned that flight attendants were mobilizing, and that day Trump backed down and reopened government.

“No one knew what a general strike was,” Nelson said, “but it scared the p*** out of them.”

In 2019, a large-scale sympathy strike may not be imminent, but Nelson thinks one is possible again.

“We’re not quite there yet,” Nelson said at a commemoration of the Pullman strike, “but when I called for a general strike during the government shutdown, I absolutely expected people to say, ‘You’re crazy, lady. You can’t do that!’ Instead, what I got was, ‘What are we waiting for? Yeah, let’s go!’ ”

Consumers, farmers, workers paying for trade war

Bill Knight column for 8-12, 13 or 14, 2019

Compared to good jobs and decent wages, Wall Street going up isn’t great for regular people, and its falling isn’t really bad news either.

The S&P 500 on Thursday surged to its biggest jump in two months, propelled by technology stocks and credited with boosting the Dow Jones up by some 370 points.

However, despite showing continued volatility, it barely affects most of us.

“The top 1 percent of Americans own more than half of stocks and mutual funds,” says Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies. “The bottom 90 percent own just 7 percent.”

Nevertheless, the causes BEHIND declines can hurt everyday Americans, whether workers, consumers or farmers.

Earlier last week, stocks plunged in the biggest drop of the year after several moves by China, President Trump’s target in his long trade war and the United States’ biggest trading partner. On Aug. 4 China announced that it will stop purchasing U.S. agricultural products, sales already at their lowest level in a decade.

“This does affect U.S. farmers and the rural U.S. voting base that’s normally in support of Donald Trump,” said Darin Friedrichs, a senior analyst at INTL FCStone. “If they hit back before the election, that’s the obvious way to retaliate.”

The next day, China implied its central bank may let its currency, the yuan, fall to its lowest point in 11 years, following Trump’s threat to impose an additional 10-percent tariff on $300 billion worth of Chinese goods on Sept. 1.

A weaker yuan can help lessen the financial impact U.S. tariffs have on Chinese goods by making them more price-competitive on international markets.

That – along with concerns about a slowing global economy, weak inflation and disappointing corporate profits – alarmed investors even more.

Then then following day, China reversed course, saying it may postpone such action, which it blamed on “market forces,” so a yuan that fell to 7.0562 to the dollar rebounded to 7.0264.

            For consumers, Trump’s new tariffs (on consumer goods such as phones, apparel, shoes, etc.) could cost the typical U.S. household an extra $200 a year, according to Oxford Economics, a global forecasting firm based in the United Kingdom.

            More than 40 percent of all clothing sold in the United States is produced in China, according to the American Apparel & Footwear Association, and some 70 percent of footwear. That may explain the unnerved retail sector, which is seeing hundreds of Kmart, Sears and Walgreens locations closing.

The additional $200 family budgets could have to absorb doesn’t include the more than $800 per year the Federal Reserve says households are now paying as a result of the current 25-percent tariff on mostly industrial products.

China also said it may also retaliate with additional tariffs on U.S. exports.

Technically, the U.S. economy is growing, with a seemingly healthy jobless rate, but Trump’s controversial trade war and the Federal Reserve’s reluctance to commit to several cuts in interest rates worry stockholders.

The next scheduled round of trade negotiations with China is next month.

Hold on.

***

After-thought – The mass-shooting tragedies in El Paso and Dayton and the ongoing misery inflicted on children and immigrants in the name of the American people reminded me of a line by Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey (portrayed by Harrison Ford in the film “42”). To rewrite Rickey’s comment to the racist general manager of the Phillies, Herb Pennock: “Someday you’re going to meet God. When He inquires as to why you didn't try to help asylum-seekers and kids detained like dogs, or do something to reduce hate-filled murders of innocent people, and you answer that it's because they were migrants or they were shooters protected by the Constitution, it may not be a sufficient reply!”

‘Star Trek’s’ Takei reflects on horrors, real and imagined

Bill Knight column for 8-8, 9 or 10, 2019

            Part of what makes horror scary is the feeling of helplessness, whether witnessing or enduring the shock and terror.

            The horrors at hand in confinement camps containing kids in caged conditions akin to kennels horrify many Americans. But detention sites for migrants actually might be worse than terrible images seared into George Takei’s memory.

            Yes, it’s happened here before.

            Takei, the 82-year-old “Star Trek” actor, activist and author, was 5 years old when his family had their home and assets seized and were forced into internment camps during World War II. Now, as the series “The Terror: Infamy” starts its 10-episode run at 8 p.m. Monday (Aug. 12), Takei – a consulting producer also featured in a supporting role) – has released a new graphic novel based on his experiences in the 1940s: “They Called Us Enemy.”

            The AMC show continues the tone of last year’s “The Terror,” only this season it’s set during World War II at internment camps, where unknowns seemingly cause bizarre deaths among imprisoned Japanese-Americans. Part ghost story and part social commentary, the show has creators and cast members who hope it inspires people’s resistance to injustice as well as entertaining audiences.

            “I know what concentration camps are,” Takei tweeted to his 10 million followers last month. “I was inside two of them, in America. And yes, we are operating such camps again.”

            Takei’s gripping, tender memoir (Top Shelf Productions, 204 pp., $19.99 paperback) – co-written by Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott, with black and white illustrations by Harmony Becker – recounts the confusion, dread and outrage felt by Takei, his family and their fellow prisoners. His dad, Takekuma Norman Takei, was a longtime U.S. resident and dry-cleaning businessman, and his mom, homemaker Fumiko Emily Takei, was a U.S. citizen born in Sacramento. They were a few of the 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry – apart from citizenship or years living in this country – swept up after the racist Executive Order 9066, based on fear and ignorance, was signed by Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt and upheld by Congress and the courts.

            “They Called Us Enemy” is provocative and painful, poignant and revealing, comparable to other graphic-novel tales of history such as Civil Rights hero and U.S. Rep. John Lewis’ “March” trilogy released in 2013-2016, and to Brian Woods’ “Rebels” series about the roots of the American Revolution, published in book form in 2016 and 2018.

            Unlike the Trump administration’s policy, families such as Takei’s stayed together, even if they were housed in manure-stained horse stalls or stark, guard-towered garrisons that made military barracks seem like country clubs.

            Becker’s art is often almost as heart-wrenching as the circumstances and the dialogue that propels the plot. Takei’s mother made clothes, his father organized neighbors, and young George went to school (unlike today’s asylum-seeking kids, who have no books, beds or basic needs, from food to soap). They were relocated to a camp in sultry, rural Arkansas, then – after responding “incorrectly” to a prisoner questionnaire on loyalty – to a facility in California.

            In a cruel irony, despite a federal lawsuit (“Korematsu v. U.S.”), the executive order was never struck down until last summer, when U.S. Supreme Court John Roberts commented that it “has no place in law under the Constitution” even as – in the same ruling – the Court upheld in a 5-4 vote President Trump’s ban on immigration from Muslim-majority nations. In Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent, she wrote, “By blindly accepting the government’s misguided invitation to sanction a discriminatory policy motivated by animosity toward a disfavored group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security, the Court redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying ‘Korematsu’ and merely replaces one ‘gravely wrong’ decision with another.”

            Recently commenting on current issues about immigration in America, Takei said, “We have reached a grotesque low. Children are being torn away from their families at our southern border … this administration is so incompetent.”

            In an emotional reflection of heated discussions challenging his father’s apparent acceptance of their incarceration, Takei remembers his dad saying, “American democracy is still the best. Roosevelt pulled us out of the Depression, and he did great things. But he was also a fallible human being, and he made a disastrous mistake that affected us calamitously. But despite all that we’ve experienced, our democracy is still the best in the world because it’s a PEOPLE’S democracy, and the people can do great things.”

            Can we do a great thing about horrors conducted in our names?