It’s nice to have a day honoring labor, but in contemporary America it seems more appropriate to have a Hedge Fund Operators Day or a Capital Gains Tax Holiday. For three hundred and sixty-four days a year we don’t honor labor in this country. We honor bling. We honor Donald Trump. If we honored labor, we’d tax wages at a lower rate than capital gains. We do the opposite. And it’s supposed to create jobs but it never seems to deliver. Our priorities are screwed up because our overlords are polluting our minds every day. That’s what I think about on Labor Day. This year, more than ever. Viva la Wisconsin.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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We don’t celebrate labor, but we seem to have some obsession with work. I recently took a significant amount of time off work (voluntarily) to travel. When I would tell people what I was doing, they would look at me like I was some kind of crazy person. I don’t see why everyone thinks you have to work like a dog your entire life and then retire at the end, when the body is too feeble to travel the way I like to travel.
Also, an anecdotal observation. I have met and talked to many, many people, both in the U.S. and abroad. In the United States, it is hardly possible to talk to a stranger without having them ask you ‘so, what do you do for a living?’ within 5 sentences. That is not the case in many other countries, where the subject is far more likely to turn to your family, like how many siblings you have, how often you get to see your parents, things like that.
Goes to show you where we are, culturally — where we find our identities, how we know ‘who we are’. Totally screwed up, if you ask me. We’re so easy to manipulate.
When I was much younger I usually answered the ‘what do you do’ question in an off-the-wall Zen manner. Sassy thing that I was, I decided that if someone started a conversation that way, they weren’t worth talking to. (And ‘Die Yuppie Scum’ was common neighborhood graffiti.)
Nowadays, no one asks me that question because everyone I talk to already knows me.
🙂
I heard a portion of Obama’s labor day speech in Detroit. It was a fiery, full campaign mode speech, at least what I heard. He’s chosen this moment to come out strong for collective bargaining as a boon to the economy, in the process ridiculing Republicans for the idiocy of trampling workers’ rights when it’s strong middle class jobs that feed the economy and stoke demand. The strategic takeaway from the speech was that he’s going to strongly assert that business is on board, unions are on board, so why the hell isn’t congress on board? In other words, point the finger directly at the obstructionists, perhaps call them out by name, and draw attention to the fact that they only represent a wealthy fringe.
He didn’t ridicule the Republicans. He ridiculed the “naysayers and cynics”. I can think of a bunch of groups that fall into that category.
I think your takeaway is probably correct. I hope he is as emotional in his delivery to Congress as he was in “campaign mode”.
But the specifics are kind of worrying except for financing deferred maintenance of infrastructure. And he’s pushing middle class tax cut, which allows hostage taking on the high-income tax cut expiring.
And he telegraphed that he’s going into Harry Truman mode. He better add—and send me a Congress.
You seem to be channeling E.J. Dionne today.
Or…when we believed!!!
Labor Day Parade, Buffalo, NY, 1900. (352,387 population in 1900)
More people than could be assembled in the largest U.S. cities today to honor the working class.
Think on it.
We’re fucked.
Think on it.
AG
Nice reminder AG. But that was an era in which life revolved around the main street. And the CBD’s were not ghost towns.
You can’t get folks to go downtown in a city that size anymore.
Green Bay in the 1970s had a kick-ass Labor Day parade. I wonder what’s going on there this year.
Tug McGraw…the spiritual leader of the last-place-to-the-World-Series Miracle Mets of 1973.
We don’t believe anymore.
So it goes.
AG
Beg to differ, Booman: we honor capital before labor the whole year ’round, including Labor Day. Just giving some of us a holiday changes nothing about the culture. Just like September 11 is now known as ‘Patriot Day’, but the patriotism of active dissent is marginalized. Don’t even get me started on Mothers’ Day ..