If They Kill the UAW, It Will Have to Be Reinvented and Expanded South
Time for Progressive Republicans Like Teddy Roosevelt to Make a Comeback
December 18, 2008
By: Dave Rogers
Progressive Republicans issued a contract similar to that of the "Contract With America" during the Newt Gingrich era.
Teddy Roosevelt.campaigns in 1912 as a Progressive Republican.
The neo-Confederate/neo-Conservative Southern strategy appears to be working.
See, they lost the Civil War in 1865.
But obviously they think the outcome can be reversed in 2009.
By winning the auto industry war.
President Bush seems to be caving in to the plot by putting the Big Three into bankruptcy.
Bush is frittering away his chance to put a shine on his sorry legacy. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Siding with the aristocrats rather than the democrats (small d and big d).
That will likely spell the end of the United Auto Workers Union after 72 years of existence.
Bankruptcy would nullify all contracts and put the fate of union-management relations in the hands of a court.
Assume any court action will eventually go to the Supreme Court, controlled by conservatives.
And, the South with its non-union, foreign owned auto plants, will triumph. No one will buy an American car because all the Big Three will be bankrupt.
Are you getting the picture?
The second Civil War will be fought in a marble building in Washington.
And the people will lose!
At least the people of the North will lose.
Abraham Lincoln's statement: "A house divided against itself cannot stand" comes prominently to mind.
Eventually, the course of events will repeat history and, after much agony, the people will ultimately regain power.
The struggle in this country, and going back thousands of years to the English, has always been the aristocratic versus the democratic.
The aristocrats, the moneyed class and those who relate to them, like the non-slaveholding Confederates, have always felt the working class inferior.
Few people except some historians recall that the South wanted to enslave all workers, black and white.
Don't believe it? Look up Republican Campaign Bulletin No. 9, issued in 1856.
And read the Richmond Enquirer and the New Orleans Picayune from those days.
Few Americans, even the Republicans themselves, recall that party was a great supporter of unions when it was founded.
That's how the Republican Party first won power: by embracing the working class in opposition to the moneyed class.
Unless the Republicans decide to support the people that party may go the way of the Whigs. But it could be saved by a new Progressive movement like that of Teddy Roosevelt in 1912.
The Bull Moose Party, as the Progressive Republicans were called, started right here in Bay City at the Michigan Republican Convention in April 1912.
Bay City's Congressman, Roy O. Woodruff, was a Progressive. Their platform called for social welfare legislation for women and children, workers' compensation, limited injunctions in strikes, farm relief, revision of banking to assure an elastic currency, required health insurance in industry, new inheritance taxes and income taxes.
Michael Lind has written a very instructive column in Salon.com that explains all this much better than I have done here. It is entitled "The Economic Civil War." You may want to read it before you condemn the unions and side with those who want to conduct the funeral of both the UAW and the U.S. auto industry.
Non-union people will be squeezed even as their executives enrich themselves. People will suffer and civil unrest may result.
Eventually, the nation will come to the realization that the South does not have the interests of the entire nation at heart.
The North will have to rise again, reorganize the UAW or some other similar union, and organize all the auto and other heavy industrial workers nationwide.
Hopefully, this will be done peaceably, not with the loss of life that marked the Civil War.
The issue today, however, is no less serious.