I don't know if it is the disappearance of sunlight now that it is late fall or if it is the overwhelmingly bad news that I consume every day but whatever it is there is a pervasive feeling of doom and gloom. The war in Syria continues. Recently a Kurdish militia, the Democratic Union Party, announced that it was setting up a provisional government in northern Syria along the Turkish border. More clashes can be expected with Sunni jihadis who have announced the creation of a caliphate in the same territory. Then there is the polio outbreak there. The virus is thought to have originated in Pakistan, likely brought to Syria by a jihadi bent on butchering Alawites.
What about the Fukushima nuclear disaster? Everything one reads about it says the worse is yet to come.
The Supreme Court is hearing arguments against union-employer neutrality agreements. If the court accepts the position that neutrality agreements are "a thing of value" and bans them then there goes one of the most effective tools that unions have utilized in the last ten years to organize workers. Obama when he was first elected was supposed to push for the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) which would have enshrined card check in federal law. He did not and there is no indication that he ever will. If the Supreme Court bans neutrality agreements one wonders what that means for the future of EFCA.
Unions, whatever their faults, are still the best hope, however slim it is, to effect change within this corrupt system. They possess resources -- money, infrastructure, intelligence -- without which our only recourse is to go the Occupy route of Hooverville-type pressure politics, and that route invariably ends in violence.
To be sure, I think we're headed in that direction. I think Chris Hedges is right: the revolution is coming. But if the Supreme Court ends up eviscerating unions when the working class is already on the ropes, then the revolution happens sooner rather than later.
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