Angry worker , angry woman today.
As usual this morning I made my coffee and sat down to read the front section and the business section of the Globe and Mail before doing my domestic chores and going to going to work the evening shift . I am conscious of feeling very angry , in a foul mood, something very unusual for me. Not unusual to be angry but to actually feel as if I cannot shake it off with a good cup of coffee and my usual routine and determination to fight back and my inner peace at knowing there is no choice but to fight back is unusual. Being reflective by nature I wonder what is wrong , what is different about this morning. I do not like feeling this way.
I realize that for the last several days I have been immersed in reading and struggling to understand better what has been happening on Wall Street . I read a comrades posting on a worker who had 10, 000 dollars invested and is worried what will happen to his savings.
In a similiar position I have been wondering what will happen to my small and similiar amount of savings. Yet for some reason I am not worried about me- what the hell I say it is too small an amount to worry about. Let them have it-I will survive and I will fight back.
I am fortunate enough to know that if I am on the bread line I will have lots of friends there.
But I am damned if they will do this without a fight.
Instead I am angry and worried how vulnerable ordinary workers are , all the time , everywhere. As I watched BBC videos showing grossly overpayed stockbrokers carrying their boxes out of Lehmann offices in NY - temporarily out of a job, I had to suppress a smile. Serves you right-maybe you will have to sell you Lexus or your second home-if you can. But what about the ordinary clerks and receptionists and thousands of individuals who may not find another job. Will their home be taken away ? Will they lose their health care plan? Will their kids have good food and happy parents?
I try to imagine the hundreds of thousands of individuals and families who have had their homes stolen from them -all because of so called "credit default swaps"- financeers and investors betting on mortgage debt and insurers of debt like AIG and when they finally get caught in their greedy game get bailed out by the taxpayer-you and me. My/our hours of work, my/our labour power, my/our everyday worries and struggles thrown into the pot to save these greedy game players.
Can we only try to imagine what the what is it?- 84 billion dollars thrown at AIG could provide in a sane and humane society, an economy planned and implemented for what is the real majority of people on this planet.
Health care, quality public education, social security for workers who have spent over 40 years of their life giving over to the boss and the rich shareholders. Free childcare , leisure time to enjoy the world WE build and sustain every dreary day our alarm clock goes off and we trudge off to work.
And to top it all off I have to struggle to understand the machinations of unproductive finance capital. Fortunate enough to be a socialist involved with comrades who also struggle to educate workers and activists about what is really going on. Still my mind feels overworked and overwhelmed and frustrated at trying to really understand what Iam reading in the paper and watching on the news.
Who else will do this? Not the education system, not the media owned by the bosses, not the labour bosses who will not for a minute see what is right in front of them and educate and make angry the workers , angry enough to see through it all., mobilize and fight back.
How many more jobs lost, how many more wars , how many more people dying from lack of health care and on and on we go?
They are stealing our homes, our jobs , our food and our lives.
So i guess I know why I am in a foul mood today and angry as hell.
But not defeated.
1 comment:
I was thinking along similar lines, Wendy. I am sure millions of people are. I mean, just the last few months how much is it? A $29 billion line of credit to JP Morgan to buy Bear Stearns. A couple hundred billion to start for Fannie and Freddie.
AIG $89 billion. Then there's more banks to come. Even McCain's argument against bail outs and for tax breaks is still a way of handing over public money as that is what will fill the gaps.
So just off the cuff we're talking a half trillion or so in a couple months and then there's all the capital the central banks have injected in to the marketplace.
So this money could have been hospitals schools etc, as you have pointed out. And look how quickly it happened. When it is education, housing, veteran's help,health care then we hear the "wheels of government turn slowly" argument.
There's a lot of lessons being learned here I think.
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