GM CEO Wagoner to step down at White House Request (AP via Yahoo! news)
I have the vaguest of recollections of Ronald Reagan firing the air traffic controllers in 1981; I remember it happening, but I had no idea what it all meant. (I was five years old at the time.) I do remember that Dad was deeply upset by it, and it was one of the many things Reagan did that eventually drove Dad to avoid politics and become bitterly cynical about them. I still can't help but wonder, had Dad lived to see the election of Barack Obama, if maybe he might have picked up some of his old enthusiasm again. Needless to say, as my own political journeys and self-discoveries have gone on through the years, I've come to realize what an important event this was in American political and labor history. I know that some on the right will say that Reagan did not, in the strictest definition of the word, "fire" the controllers, and that his actions were legal under the Taft-Hartley Act, but neither of those factors mitigates the fact that what Reagan did was morally reprehensible, and perhaps the single most destructive action in American union history. This was one of the biggest bombs the Republicans have dropped in their open warfare against the lower and working classes, a war that has gone on now for nearly thirty years with little mitigation from the Clinton and Obama presidencies so far.
As the avarice of the upper classes has caused the rapid dismantling of the foundations of our economy, I haven't been able to stop myself from daydreaming about a president -- the daydreams usually involve a President Nader, since I know Obama is both incapable and unwilling of doing so -- who comes out to deliver a nationally televised speech on the lawn of the White House, saying that all of the bank and financial and automotive and other CEOs whose greed caused this financial collapse -- were fired, effective immediately, and ineligible to serve in management jobs for the rest of their lives, just as Reagan barred the striking air traffic controllers from serving in other federal jobs. Granted, there are no laws on the books enabling a President to do this, but that doesn't make the proposition any less absurd than what Reagan did under Taft-Hartley. If nothing else, the fact that we, as a country, now have an 80% stake in AIG, should mean that we get to pick who runs the company.
It sickens me to hear pundits say that we need to keep the executives who ran the banks and financial markets into the ground in their current positions because "no one else is capable of running the companies." If they were capable of running their companies, then why have they all cratered, taking the rest of us along with them? Say what you will about the responsibilities air traffic controllers have for making sure that planes don't crash into one another, but already this financial crisis has hit middle- and working-class America in a nearly catastrophic way, and we're probably not yet at the worst part of this crisis. This country's universities churn out MBAs at an alarming rate because if there has been any growth industry in this country since the Reagan days, it's in unnecessary corporate bureaucracy. Don't tell me that we don't have enough people who possess the skills needed to run these companies.
The problem is not a deficit of skills; it is a deficit of morals. No matter how many studies are done to debunk the myth of supply-side economics being good for all classes, the upper classes, and the venal politicans they help elect through their massive infusions of cash and distortions of the public dialogue, continue to push through this idea that helping the rich get richer benefits everyone, despite all of the empirical and anecdotal evidence of how it crushes the wallets, the homes, and the spirits of the working class. If we are going to rebuild our economic foundation, if we are going to climb out of this very deep hole that the upper classes have dug this country into, then we need to take the shovels away from the people who dug the hole (and made themselves plenty rich doing so), and put in charge people who aren't going to build themselves mansions off of the money they could make charging us for ladders to climb out of the hole. We need moral, responsible executives in finances, banking, and every other industry, who will put the needs of their workers, their customers, and their country, above the needs of their families, their boards of directors, and their shareholders. The executives still in charge of these failed companies have already proven that they cannot do that, so we should throw the whole lot of them out.
Although I'm not the strongest believer in numerology and related sciences, I do think that they deserve paying attention to, and that made this past week and a half so odd for me. It started with the second Friday the 13th in as many months a couple of weeks ago, then moved straight on to Pi Day (remember, I was always much better at maths than English growing up, so I still note Pi Day and Mole Day and all of those things), and then a week ago today was the Ides of March. The 16th was the anniversary of my parents buying this house, and of course St. Patrick's Day was the day after that. I turned 33 on the 18th, and then I couldn't think of anything that special about the 19th except I vaguely remember it being the birthday of an elementary school crush whose name I've long forgotten. The 20th was the equinox, and then yesterday Dad would have turned 63. I'm out of that series of days now, but it was definitely odd to have so many of those days all in a row.
My birthday itself went okay, although I had to cut short a meeting with some friends after work so I could come home for the big party; in the past, spending the birthday with non-family members usually hasn't worked out so well, so I'm making a point of having birthdays at home from now on. The birthday booty was kind of big, including several CDs, a couple of books, Wii Points (although I haven't had a chance to play on my Wii in forever) from the family, and the deluxe Pulp Fiction (I'd only ever bought the original DVD release, strange to relate), and a Barnes and Noble gift card from friends. Unfortunately, I've been so busy with other things, my book and DVD piles are both back to being absurdly large; even if I make extra time for reading here, I doubt I'll get through all the books I already own by the end of the year, and I've still got more on the way.
Although I'm not blogging as much as I used to -- something I've noticed with everyone else whose blogs I follow -- I am trying to keep my Twitter account up-to-date at the very least. (I need to put a Twitter feed on the .org, I know.) It doesn't help that I've got a social life again for the first time in about four years, and I've got all sorts of special stuff coming up. Part of me wonders if moving to tweets is part of the natural evolution of the Internet, but it's probably something I should resist, given that I'm trying to make a living, at least in part, on my writing. It's not that I don't have things I want to talk about here -- I still have a huge list of potential blog topics on my whiteboard -- but finding the time to blog these days is very, very difficult, even with a reduced teaching load this semester. Someone needs to prod me to write here more often.
One of the stories I've been reading recently is set at a dinner party. It's not exactly Mrs. Dalloway, but it is good, and I can relate to it better because it's set in America, albeit 1950s America. There is something about the 1950 American dinner party that seems so remote to me; at first when I was reading the story, it was hard for me to identify with the kind of upper-class people being depicted in the story, the whole idea of "summering" away from home, and most of the things they were talking about. (There was a brief debate about literature, though, which was accessible for me.)
As I kept reading, though, I realized that, well, I used to be involved in this sort of thing. My paternal grandparents had a cottage on an island south of Mackinac Island in Lake Huron, and when I was younger I would go up, sometimes with Dad and sometimes with the entire family, and spend a weekend or a week up there, and while I was up there we usually did have dinner parties two or three times a week much like the parties being depicted in the story. It's no wonder that I blocked out the memory of those dinner parties -- they're one of the main reasons I've been a teetotaler my entire life, and that island was where I was raped when I was thirteen -- but even if I hadn't been blocking out those memories, I guess they really wouldn't have helped me that much because those dinner parties mean much different things to children than they do to adults. Apart from everyone (save my parents, thank Goddess) getting drunk, the main thing I remember about those parties is everyone talking about boring, boring stuff.
I hardly ever think of myself as belonging to the kind of social class that has those kinds of dinner parties. Although my family wasn't without its financial troubles over the years, by and large we've been fairly well-off. At the private school they sent me to, though, our family was one of the poorest families there, and the students there loved to lord that fact over my head. (It wasn't like I didn't give them other things to pick on me for, believe me.) When I was a student at the University of Toledo and I visited other students' homes and apartments, though, I was reminded that, yeah, my family wasn't all that bad off financially. Still, we live in a part of town that isn't exactly upper-class, and there are a lot of union families here, and I certainly identify more with them than I do the upper-class families I went to school with when I was younger. I guess I feel a kind of dysfunction when it comes to identifying my own social class, and stories like the one I've been reading make me think about this stuff a lot. I can't really figure out how to clear up this mess in my mind, though.
I mean, I've kind of been a hermit for the past four years or so, although I'm getting better at that. I'm trying to figure out why these dinner parties I read about are drawing so much of my attention right now. How are they that different from the "pizza and video games" parties I went to in college, or the meetings at restaurants I've been doing lately? If anything, the parties I actually go to should be holding more of my attention, simply because I don't have to worry about booze at them. Maybe it's that discussion of literature in the story I've been reading; it would be nice to have someone with whom I could discuss literature and similar topics. I don't see myself hosting, or going to, any "dinner parties" anytime soon, though.