solidarity with American workers who, back in the 1880s, were
suffering unusually harsh conditions in their effort to achieve an
eight-hour workday. The US is one of the few countries where this
day of solidarity with US labor is hardly even known.
This morning, way in the back of the Boston Globe, there was a
little item whose headline read, “May Day Celebration in Boston.” I
was surprised, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen that here in the
US. It turned out that there indeed was a May Day celebration, of
the usual kind, but it was being held by Latin American and Chinese
workers who’ve recently immigrated here.
That’s a dramatic example of the efficiency with which business
controls US ideology, of how effective its propaganda and
indoctrination have been in depriving people of any awareness of
their own rights and history. You have to wait for poor Latino and
Chinese workers to celebrate an international holiday of solidarity
with American workers.
In his New York Times column, Anthony Lewis wrote: “Unions in
this country, sad to say, are looking more and more like the British
unions...backward, unenlightened....The crude, threatening tactics
used by unions to make Democratic members of the House vote
against NAFTA underline the point.”
That brings out Lewis’s real commitments very clearly. What he
called “crude, threatening tactics” were labor’s attempt to get their
representatives to represent their interests. By the standards of the
elite, that’s an attack on democracy, because the political system is
supposed to be run by the rich and powerful.
Corporate lobbying vastly exceeded labor lobbying, but you can’t
even talk about it in the same breath. It wasn’t considered raw
muscle or antidemocratic. Did Lewis have a column denouncing
corporate lobbying for NAFTA?
I didn’t see it.
I didn’t see it either.
Things reached the peak of absolute hysteria the day before the
vote. The New York Times lead editorial was exactly along the lines
of that quote from Lewis, and it included a little box that listed the