[THS] !!!! Chris Hedges: Boycott FedEx

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24827.htm

Boycott FedEx
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/boycott_fedex_20100222/
Posted on Feb 22, 2010

By Chris Hedges

Dean Henderson’s career with FedEx ended abruptly when a reckless driver plowed
into his company truck and mangled his leg. His doctor will decide this week if it
needs to be amputated. No longer able to drive, stripped of value in our commodity
culture, he was tossed aside by the company. He became human refuse. He spends
most of his days, because of the swelling and the pain, with his leg raised on a
recliner in the tiny apartment in Fairfax, Va., he shares with his stepsister. He
struggles without an income and medical insurance, and he fears his future.

Henderson is not alone. Workers in our corporate state earn little when they
work—Henderson made $18 an hour—and they are abandoned when they can no
longer contribute to corporate profits. It is the ethic of the free market. It is the cost
of unfettered capitalism. And it is plunging tens of millions of discarded workers into a
collective misery and rage that is beginning to manifest itself in a dangerous right-
wing backlash.

“This happened while I was wearing their uniform and driving one of their company
vehicles,” Henderson, a 40-year-old military veteran, told me. “My foot is destroyed. I
have a fused ankle. I have had over a dozen surgeries. It hurts to wear a sock. I was
limping pretty badly, but in the spring of 2008 FedEx said I had to come back to work
and sit in a chair. It saved them money on workers’ compensation payments. I
worked a call center job and answered telephones. I did that for three months. I had
my ankle fused in January 2009, and then FedEx fired me. I was discarded. They
washed their hands of me and none of this was my fault.”

Our destitute working class is beginning to grasp that Barack Obama and other
elected officials in Washington, who speak in a cloying feel-your-pain language, are
liars. They are not attempting to prevent wages from sinking, unemployment from
mounting, foreclosures from ripping apart communities, banks from looting the U.S.
Treasury or jobs from being exported. The gap between our stark reality and the
happy illusions peddled by smarmy television news personalities and fatuous
academic and financial experts, as well as oily bureaucrats and politicians, is
becoming too wide to ignore. Those cast aside are reaching out to anyone, no matter
how buffoonish or ignorant, who promises that the parasites and courtiers who serve
the corporate state will disappear. Right-wing rage is being fused with right-wing
populism. And once this takes hold, a protofascism will sweep across our blighted
landscape fueled by a mounting personal and economic despair. Take a look at
Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here.” It is a good window into what awaits us.

“One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years
by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out,” the
philosopher Richard Rorty warns in his book “Achieving Our Country.” “Jocular
contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ will
once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has
tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment
which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them
by college graduates will find an outlet.”

Whoever rides to power on the back of this rage will swiftly broker a deal with
corporations and corporate overlords. But by then it will be too late. Dissent will
become a form of treason. The security state will be quickly cemented in place. The
bankrupt liberal class, which abandoned the working class and the fight for basic civil
liberties, will be reviled, discredited and impotent. America will develop its own
peculiar form of Christian fascism.

Obama, entranced with power and prestige, is more interested in courting the elite
than saving the disenfranchised. The president, when asked to name a business
executive he admires, cited Frederick Smith of FedEx, although Smith is a union-
busting Republican. Smith, who was a member of Yale’s secret Skull & Bones Society
along with George W. Bush, served as John McCain’s finance chair. I guess Obama is
hoping for some cash. And Smith has a lot of it. He founded FedEx in 1971, and the
company had more than $35 billion in revenue in the fiscal year that ended in May.
Smith is rich and powerful, but there is no ethical system, religious or secular, that
would hold him up as a man worthy of emulation. Those who make vast profits at the
expense of workers and the common good are not moral. They are not worthy of
adulation. They build fortunes and little monuments to themselves off the pain and
suffering of people like Henderson. Jesus called them “vipers.”

“He’s an example of somebody who is thinking long term,” the president said of
Smith in an interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, adding that he “really enjoyed
talking” with him at a Feb. 4 White House luncheon.

Smith does think in the long term. His company lavished money on members of
Congress in 1996 so they would vote for an ad hoc change in the law banning the
Teamsters Union from organizing workers at Federal Express. A few stalwarts in the
Senate, including Edward Kennedy (in a speech reprinted in the Congressional
Record on Oct. 1, 1996) and his then-colleague Paul Simon, denounced the obvious.
The company had bought its legislative exemption. Most members of Congress, then
as now, had become corporate employees.

“I think we have to honestly ask ourselves, why is Federal Express being given
preferential treatment in this body now?” Sen. Simon said at the time. “I think the
honest answer is Federal Express has been very generous in their campaign
contributions.”

Following the Senate vote, a company spokesman was quoted as saying, “We played
political hardball, and we won.”

What happened to our historical memory? How did we forget that those who built
our democracy and protected American workers were not men like Smith, who use
power and money to further the parochial and selfish interests of the elite, but the
legions of embattled strikers in the coal fields, on factory floors and in steel mills that
gave us unions, decent wages and the 40-hour workweek. How was it possible in
1947 to pass the Taft-Hartley Labor Act, which, in one deft move, emasculated the
labor movement? How is it possible that it remains in force? Union workers, who at
times paid with their lives, halted the country’s enslavement to the rich and the
greedy. And now that unions have been broken, rapacious corporations like FedEx
and toadies in Congress and the White House are turning workers into serfs.

UPS is unionized. It is the largest employer of the Teamsters. Labor costs, because of
the union, account for almost two-thirds of its operating expenses. But Smith spends
only a third of his costs on labor. There is something very wrong with a country that
leaves a worker like Henderson sitting most of the day in a tiny apartment in
excruciating pain and fighting off depression while his billionaire former boss is feted
as a man of vision and invited to lunch at the White House. A country that stops
taking care of its own, that loses the capacity for empathy and compassion, that
crumples up human beings and throws them away when it is done with them, feeds
dark ideological monsters that inevitably rise to devour the body politic.

FedEx is busy making sure Congress keeps unions out of its shops. It has lavished
$17 million, double its 2008 total, on Congress to fight off an effort by UPS and the
Teamsters to revoke Smith’s tailor-made ban on unions. Smith, again thinking “long
term,” plans to continue to hire thousands of full-time employees and list them as
independent contractors. If his workers are listed as independent contractors he does
not have to pay Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance taxes. And
when they get sick or injured or old he can push them onto the street. Henderson
says FedEx treats its equipment as shabbily as its employees. There’s no difference
between trucks and people to corporations that view everything as a commodity.
Corporations exploit human beings and equipment and natural resources until
exhaustion or collapse. They are cannibals.

“The trucks are a liability,” Henderson said. “They are junk. The tires are bald. The
engines cut out. There are a lot of mechanical problems. The roofs leak. They wobble
and pull to one side or the other. The heating does not work. And the company
pushes its employees in the same way. The first Christmas I was there I worked 13
hours without a break and without anything to eat. It is dangerous. I could have
fallen asleep at the wheel and injured someone.”

If you have to send packages do not be a scab. Send it with UPS or the U.S. Postal
Service. They have unions. Every step, however tiny, we take to thwart the corporate
rape of the country and protect workers counts. We would have to do more, much
more, but this would be a small start. Like Smith, our politicians have sold their souls.
They will not help us. We must help ourselves. And the longer we stand by and
permit the Democrats and the Republicans to strip American workers of their jobs
and their dignity the less we will have to say when the day of angry retribution
arrives.