Will Unions Successfully Resist Decline?

- 06:46pm Apr 12, 2005 EDT "I say fear the civilians, they're taking over"-Barry Goldwater 1963

Labor Unions organized in the United States primarily in an era free from the gross corruption of the first amendment by the broadcast media. In American society political organization was still meaningful and a practical step for oppressed workers to take to wrest some negotiating leverage to their side from large and often cruel corporations that at least had the virtue of being American owned generally.

With the post-Cronkite era of broadcast journalism that expanded through a number of channels toward raving corruption and bunk dissemination for content after 1990, the broadcast media became an Orwellian ‘big bother’ able to brainwash and concatenate the political thought of the masses. Though I might not word this concisely within the time parameter available today, I wanted to make the point that the mass media as an agency of socialization has mass-short circuited the way people think in the United States about politics, and of course what they talk about. The political power trickles up to trans-national corporate owners of the media, while the trade balance is perennially huge, income and opportunity is redistributed abroad, and the meaning of politics is more about ‘flavor’ than substance.

Labor Unions are dwarfed by the problems of mass organizations and how they are controlled. Labor Unions that originated in pre-cold war era politics and in the comparative silence and moderate respect for the public of mass media broadcasts existed in a different social environment. Today the social environment is dominated by the broadcast media and their trans-national parents. One might ask what’s wrong with outsourcing U.S. economic liberty and political independence?

The vast accumulation of wealth made possible by trans-national stock owners in the limited global environ permits a theoretical consolidation of political power to trans-national owners. The political environment they create would be very unfavorable to labor unions and individualism. The trans-national oligarchic structure would disapprove of even modest restructuring or alterity to the U.S. national infrastructure outside of their existing business structures. In brief, the oligharchic power of trans-national corporations would be a force of stagnation.

Labor Unions of course run dead on into the problems of propaganda the trans-national owners of the broadcast media can put out. Trans-nationals can exploit the author of ‘Footprints in the Sand’ for decades seemingly, accomplish gross civil rights violations and in their skill at trans-border unaccountability techniques assume a royal prerogative to perpetrate crime such as racketeering stalking etc.; Trans-nationals broadcast media can accomplish more substantive repression of civil rights and union goals than that, however.

Trans-national broadcast power should be reallocated to one-way Internet transmissions of pre-loaded pages, alphabetized and sent via satellite via the million, updated every hour. Internet receivers could select a webpage range and read whatever was downloaded to the limit of their storage capacity.

Labor Unions will experience the problem of creating any non-commercial organizations uncoopted by the vast power of the trans-nationals that veritably program the language of ordinary Americans into the rave of the daily, or annual hate as it were. Labor Unions have the problem of trust and of being associated with leftist movements that might eliminate individual rights entirely, in a mirror image to that of the neo-corporatist trends of the U.S. Government and trans-national corporations.

Interrogation at the Oil Refinery

GaryCGibson - 11:38am Apr 4, 2005 EDT (#54 of 55)The physical Universe exists within the will of God. At the largest and smallest scales it's parameters are unknowable except as revealed by Non-Contingent Being.. The scalable universe is rational.

He said; “The F.B.I. wants to know the name of anyone who takes a picture of the oil refinery”.

Standing there by my bicycle being interrogated and I.D. checked by three policemen with a private security officer watching from the parking lot of a convenience store on the corner next to his large red pickup truck that he’d used to pursue and shout at me to halt from before calling the police force I said “It’s like the Soviet Union isn’t it? They too had restricted photo zones in the time before liberation.”

Around the corner next was the refinery, turning from Highway 82 onto Highway 285, between curses inspired by a lengthy difficult ride through the oil fields between Lamesa Texas and Artesia New Mexico, high pulse rate, and the importunity of being delayed by lazy mechanically conveyed dumped servo-units of the trans-national oil when I finally had a chance to have the wind direction become positive instead of negative (several days of jet stream wind up to 50 mph at surface level that flowed along the west slope of the Rocky Mountains from Canada made a hard left turn at southern New Mexico to the east making bike trekking quite tough) I explained why I had taken the pictures of the refinery briefly resting on the public highway shoulder “Because it’s so ugly”.

Indeed it was. The seventy miles of oil fields to the east punctured and polluted the landscape in increasing density as they approached the refinery at Artesia. It’s an old field yet there is lots of recent drilling activity and new wells. The high prices for oil have made drilling profitable again, yet the new development must have been planned at least a couple years ago. The use of so much land for oil drilling at moderately high altitude over 3500 feet made it difficult to find a safe place to set up a tent at dusk. During the night ambient waves of fossil fuel gases produce and unhealthy odur.

The oil refinery in Artesia a couple of blocks from the main road, and nearly to the intersection of Hwy 82 and Hwy185 is an obvious target of photography for those inspired by Andy Worhol motifs o searching for web page wallpaper. Because of its prominent location imposingly situated like a representative post-modern castellae of doom one can’t avoid tilting past the evil monstrosity.

Until abruptly halted on the bike and told by a law enforcement official, I had forgotten that oil refineries are “military targets”, and perhaps subject to articles by environmentalists and citizens concerned with returning to a balanced federal budget with an alternative energy driven economy. A sign with a camera on it with a bar through it should be posted before the refinery to forewarn the public about the FBI photo trap.

If I can every afford to travel by air, would I now get extra scrutiny or ‘no fly’ classification on the secret FBI verboten person’s listing distributed to airpork security personnel?

Has Os Bin Ladin asked his engineer father or brothers for blueprints of vulnerable points of oil refineries, or used ‘Ask Jeeves’ to locate use oil refineries? Should cigarette lighters in the United States be outlawed?

The Artesia refinery is such an easy access for detonation target apparently that it could serve as evidence for the disinterest of Al Qa’eda in blowing up U.S. oil refineries to raise prices above the anticipated 100-dollar per barrel oil possibly coming soon. Destroying U.S. oil refineries would raise per barrel prices to the 500-dollar mark, and perhaps push congress into doing something meaningful about alternative energy and national energy independence with a more egalitarian and democratic production capability.

New Mexico has vast potential for wind and solar power development. A national energy independence holiday should be given each year so the public has an opportunity to picket oil refineries until they close and the congress orders power lines to be placed into federal highways for electric engines and intertie to the power line rights for homeowners.

Beyond the abandoned 15,000 acre township of Blackdom New Mexico, founded in 1908 and left in 1922 when Pecos River water supplies were decisively unreliable, I continued to ride. Will U.S. prosperity also dry up because of a parallel reliance on unreliably and costly, fossil fuel supplies?

You may ask yourself “Isn’t it time Congress creates new alternative energy legislation with profuse onomatopoeia, cantos flowing in alliterations, dactyl feet and consonance?" Perhaps not, even so some progressive alternative energy legislation should be written into a redrafted federal budget bill in order to liberate the nation from a deficit producing, trans-national enriching federal policy supporting the degradation of U.S. workforce wages and environmental security.