Labor Day not about workers anymore

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2007/09/03/s1b_LABORDAY_0903.html

By RON HAYES

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Monday, September 03, 2007

Labor Day used to be about labor.

Before the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy telethon and all those "spectacular" end-of-summer sales came along, Labor Day was about honoring working Americans.



There were Labor Day parades and Labor Day picnics. Now the parades have all but disappeared, and the picnics aren't what they used to be.

"I can very distinctly remember the Labor Day picnics during the war," says Jim Weldon, who retired this year as business manager for Local 728 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers after 51 years in the movement. "They had a much better turnout then. But we still have the AFL-CIO picnic in Okeeheelee Park, and a lot of our retired members go. I'll be there. There'll be 600 or 700 people there."

And then he pauses to reconsider.

"Well, that would be on the high end," he adds. "Probably more like 400 or 500."

Any way you look at it, labor is laboring.

Last year, only 12 percent of America's employed wage and salary workers belonged to a union, down from 12.5 percent the year before and a drop of 326,000 people, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The labor movement in America has seen a steady decline in membership since 1983, the first year for which comparable data were available, when 20.1 percent of workers were union men and women.

FULL story at link.

[two gun sid]

1. So sad...

I grew up in the labor movement and attended picnics with my parents and grandparents. It was always great getting together with other fellow worker's families. And good for the Union.

I am a Union worker and I can't remember the last time my local had any kind of celebration on Labor Day.

[Joanne98]

2. And the MSM is not even talking about labor issues.

They'll spend all day talking about backyard barbecues and BUSH in Iraq!

[MatrixEscape]

3. Even though the actual labor ...

is what really keeps this crazy, capitalistic system running full steam into an obvious oblivion of untold proportions, it has been relgated to the sidelines by the adept, systematic sheepliziation of the masses. It is so effective, that a very large percentage of those masses here in America are virtually informed and controlled by media as their main sources of information and calculated distraction. That does not even take into account the endless salvos of carefully placed and presented misinformation and inspired psyops. It is rampant and it is by design. Every observed result elicits a new form of broadcasted, reactive result. Not much is left to guesswork but variables are certainly factored in when you take population control and manipulation to be a scientific cornerstone to the media dissemination of information. And yet, that is not the only factor in the equation, as some will come to see.

The working-class and more increasingly so, the middle-class, has deceptively and effectively been downtrodden and sequestered in the MSM version of reality. Sadly, this has happened with very little fanfare or upheaval because the addition to media and entertainment as both a satisfying catharsis and a comforting distraction has become the most powerful and successful tool for massive manipulation ever dreamed of.

Think carefully about who and what is presented to you in the overall paradigm of modern advertising and television shows. While there are those scripted, pretend-to-be-reality shows that seem to portray something you might relate to, you really only see something that points upwards towards goals that a capitalistic system wants you to focus on in exchange for your time, your life, and your very immediate now. It is all bout distraction. While we might revel in the vast amounts of media, shows, and choices we seem to have, we could consider taking the time to ask ourselves what the amalgamation of this constant, invasive, almost all-encompassing barrage actually is pointing towards.

It seems to point, in my opinion, towards a bloated, narcissistic exaggeration of the idea of a self by way of the culturally induced concept of an ego -- something that does not really exist when you try to pin it down. This system tends to point out the inevitable failurs and shortcomings of that ego while simultaneously offering quick, easily purchased fixes for the problems presented as factual predicaments crying out for solutions. In that case, we see that the creation of the problem is the problem and the solutions are merely false responses to a manufactured need that we are all vulnerable to because the nature of the media and the delivery are tuned into our basic drives and intrinsic needs.

I would never blame the resulting media as the cause of our dilemma. It merely gives the people what they want, just a Fascism tends to capitalize on reflections of the underlying zeitgeist of the people it inspires and builds upon. This is not a one-way street. It is a puzzle similar to asking, do commercials exist to bring you the content, or does the content exist to bring you the commercials. Without an accepting and complicit audience to condone and nurture a social phenomena, it simply would not gain much ground.

In that case, knowledge is actually power and being complacent and blindly accepting what is presented is a matter of being compliant even if that proves to be counterproductive to one's own personal security, safety, and situational abundance. So, as we see the larger wave of endless, despicable sell-outs performed in worship of that arbitrary, symbolic non-commodity called money, we find ourselves to be a the very foundation of its support and continuation, simply because we abide by it and agree to it for our temporal comfort's sake.

You are not going to get any revolution or even a change out of people who see money as real and need leadership to sustain and uplift themselves. History proves that to be a fact. It is a hard fact, but true, nonetheless.

[Double T]

4. I thought Labor Day was the day we honored ALL the Asian workers........

that are making the products and providing the services that American workers used to do.

[Blue_Tires]

5. ttt n/t