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Paul Elisha: A blessing and not a curse

It appears that despite a spate of super-technical achievement, in which managers of America’s new computer-connected technology believe they can create or improve on just about anything, despots of American Capitalism are mounting an all-out campaign to destroy and subjugate Organized Labor.

America’s first truly Republican President, Abraham Lincoln took issue with such aims, in his very first Message to Congress, in 1861, with these words:  “Capital,” he said, “is only the fruit of Labor and could never have existed, if Labor had not existed first.”   Some forty years earlier, an eloquent Senator Daniel Webster pointed out that…  “labor in this country is independent and proud and doesn’t ask the patronage of Capital.  Capital,” he said, “solicits the aid of Labor.”

Those of the Religious-Right, who now seem to support the politically self-serving Republican view, have obviously and conveniently forgotten the Old Testament observation in Proverbs:  “In all labor there is profit… but the talk of lips tendeth only to penury.”

The great scientist, Albert Einstein, in an address to the California Institute of Technology, in 1931, seems to have put the capper on the subject, in every aspect.  “Concern for man and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors,” he said…  “concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization of labor and the distribution of goods;  so that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to Mankind.  Never forget this, in the midst of your diagrams and equations.”

Someone needs to remind both the Capitalist corporate despots and their technocrat managers, that it still takes more than money and technology, to conquer the kind of human spirit that made this incredible experiment in government for and by The People, a reality.  We must all do our utmost, now, to keep it a work-in-progress.