Who Made America Prosper?
As the Republicans beat the drum against “socialism” and faux-Populists like Sarah Palin and the “Tea Party” claim that “smaller” government will return us to a vaguely-recalled time of “good old-fashioned American grit,” I feel compelled to connect the dots to the facts of America’s rise to working-class prosperity.
To those who now maintain that an unrestrained free market is the panacea for the ills of the working class, I would say that the platform upon which their own families were elevated to prosperity and made safe from economic privation was put into place not by corporations but by the American government.
A few examples: the Homestead Act of 1862, Teddy Roosevelt’s anti-trust laws, Rural Electrification, generously funded public education, legal protection for labor (paid for with labor’s blood), the New Deal and Social Security, and trade and tariff laws which kept industrial jobs here in this country. Working-class families such as Palin’s were able to maintain homes, make ends meet and educate their kids through these and later enhancements such as the GI Bill, Johnson’s War On Poverty, Nixon’s Food Stamp program.
Before government-enforced working-class gains halted the economic brutality of amoral capitalists like J.D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, there was no greater protection for American workers than there was in Dickens’ London or is in today’s worst-off third world countries. Would we now condemn our working families to such depredations?
It was the heroic struggle of twentieth-century labor organizers and public champions of the poor, which wrested a portion of the nation’s wealth out of the hands of big capitalists and made it available to the working class, that fostered the popular prosperity that capitalist-controlled government and media now disingenuously attribute to revisionist fictions about bootstrap entrepreneurship and “supply-side humanitarianism”—an oxymoron if ever there was one.
Can we conceive of how much prosperity has been lost through the plutocratic free-for-all known as GATT/ NAFTA, or through the systematic dismantling of labor laws, anti-trust laws, the strong postwar tax base and the social safety net?
The two major political parties and their corporate media partners now hoodwink working Americans into thinking that giving total control of the U.S. economy into the hands of global capitalists is their best hope for prosperity. But that has never been the case, and it will not save us now.
Ursula Shea
Florence
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On Our New Cartoon
I hate it. Really. I hate it.
Having This Modern World was a real statement. Yeah, I can read it online, but having it be a regular Advocate piece was just plain cool. It gave your exceptional local arts rag some real street cred somehow.
The presence of Mild Abandon just rubs salt in my wound.
Kathy McRae
via email
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Make Manufacturers Take Things Back
In last week’s Advocate [Between the Lines: “Whose Trash?”], Maureen Turner wrote about the Enhanced Producer Responsibility legislation that seems to be gaining momentum in Massachusetts as Holyoke, and now Springfield, have approved it. It is great to see some towns take the initiative to make manufacturers responsible for the products they make that don’t have any place in the world, other than the dump, after the manufacturers have built a “new and improved” product and the two-year-“old” product has become outmoded. I fully support the green responsibility approach these two towns have taken.
Turner also briefly drew our attention to the Massachusetts Bottle Bill as an example of EPR legislation that many states adapted in the past. And I’d like to take a moment to remember the Massachusetts Bottle Bill because it currently does not cover many water, juice and sport drink bottles which make up 30 percent of bottles consumed in this state, 80 percent of which find their last resting place in landfills instead of redemption centers. In town landfills and recycling programs the bottles eat up about $4-5 million in taxpayer money annually, which, I have an inkling, could be well spent elsewhere. The resolution to update Massachusetts’ Bottle Bill will be going before the state Legislature soon, so I invite all municipalities to do your residents a favor and remember the Bottle Bill (my data is from the DSM Environmental 2009 study, “Analysis of the Impact of an Expanded Bottle Bill on Municipal Refuse and Recycling Costs and Revenues”).
Vanessa Calderon
South Hadley
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Reading Between the Lines: “Whose Trash?” made me hopeful that our state is moving in the right direction, but I know there is more to be done. The article mentioned the Massachusetts Bottle Bill, which puts the five-cent deposit on carbonated beverages. In the last 27 years, the Bottle Bill has remained the most successful recycling program in the state. We recycle 70 percent of the bottles that have a deposit on them but only 25 percent of containers without the deposit.
Unfortunately, the bill doesn’t include many types of bottles, like water and juice bottles, that were either not in existence or not abundant when it was passed into law. So every year in Massachusetts we throw away over 1 billion bottles, which end up in landfills or are burned in trash incinerators, polluting our water and air.
Right now, there is an updated version of the Bottle Bill going through the Legislature that would put a deposit on all types of bottles. This bill is good for the environment, public health and the economy, plus we know it works.
Many towns, including Springfield, Holyoke, and Northampton, have endorsed updating the Bottle Bill. These resolutions show public support, which is necessary to pass policy. If your town has not endorsed updating the Bottle Bill, please encourage it to do so.
Emily Mailloux
Montague
