Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. This is the United States of America. Our pilot and crew are under the influence of unseen forces. Our position is unknown and our time is growing short. We have 311 million souls on board. We are in urgent need of assistance.
There's "May Day" - and there's "Mayday." "May Day" is a celebration of life and renewal. For the last 125 years or so it's also served as a rallying cry for the rights of working men and women. "Mayday," on the other hand, is the international phrase which indicates that a vessel, building, or person is in imminent danger and urgently needs help.
It's May Day. Mayday.
The word "Mayday" comes from the French phrase venez m'aider: "Come help me." It dates back to 1923, an era when French was the language of diplomacy (hence the term "lingua franca") - and diplomats frowned on espionage because "gentlemen do not read one another's mail."
The FAA's protocol for a distress call is to say the word "Mayday" three times. You then state your identity, the nature of the emergency, weather conditions, the pilot's intentions, your present position and heading, and the "the number of souls on board."
The May Day holiday was a European Pre-Christian festival of renewal. Later it was Christianized into a celebration of the Virgin Mary. You remember the Virgin Mary, don't you? She was a teenaged mother who lived in an occupied land, under a colonizing power whose rulers loathed her religion and despised her people.
Oh, and speaking of mothers and children: All across the country they're cutting assistance to lower-income households with children. Budgets for primary and high school education are being slashed. Mitt Romney says he'll cut these funds even more and boasts that he'll separate poor mothers from their kids to teach them "the dignity of work."
They're slashing public university budgets too. As tuitions keep soaring millions of young people lose the chance for a better life. Others have reached record levels of indebtedness to get their diploma, only to graduate into the worst employment market for young people in generations.
Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. This is the United States of America. We are abandoning our mothers and our children. Our position is unknown and the time is growing short. We have 311 million souls on board. We are in urgent need of assistance.
May Day became a labor festival in 1886, after strikes escalated into violent clashes and four marchers were shot to death by policemen in the city of Chicago. (Chicago's current mayor, corporate apparatchik Rahm Emanuel, is outsourcing his city's function to business entities.)
Historian Peter Linebaugh gives us the words to a song the strikers sang back in the 1800s:
We want to feel the sunshine;
We want to smell the flowers;
We're sure God has willed it.
And we mean to have eight hours.
Today the eight-hour work day is being eroded through the misclassification of workers as 'managerial' and the widespread hiring of workers as 'contractors' instead of employees. Corporate-friendly politicians help the paymasters with bills like Sen. Kay Hagan's "Computer Professionals Overtime Act," which would disqualify many technical workers from overtime pay.
Why? Because, as the Charlotte Observer notes, "Computer giants such as IBM have invested thousands of dollars lobbying politicians to clarify labor laws that would allow them to give their computer employees more flexible work schedules, but also to stop paying them overtime."
Inflation-adjusted wages for most working people have been stagnant for decades.
Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. Workers can't defend their rights or negotiate for better wages. We're losing our standard of living. Our industrial cities are in ruins. The middle class is dying. We have 311 million souls on board. We are in urgent need of assistance.
Poll after poll has shown that most Americans, including a majority of Republican voters, oppose cutting Social Security and Medicare to balance the Federal budget. Yet the GOP's aggressively pushing for cuts - and for dismantling Medicare altogether through a voucher system.
Rather than fight for these popular and highly successful programs, one Democrat after another is endorsing the far-right "Bowles/Simpson" plan which would harm the middle class while capping taxes for the rich.
The smart - and politically popular - approach would be to increase our inadequate Social Security benefits and reign in the for-profit healthcare system that's harming Medicare and endangering the government's long-term fiscal security. Instead they keep talking about a "Grand Bargain" that would do the opposite.
Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. We're abandoning our elderly and disabled. We can't afford medicine for our sick and injured. We have 311 million souls on board. We are in urgent need of assistance.
Austerity economics is destroying Europe, but our leaders keep on pursuing it here at home. The Ryan/Romney budget would essentially board up the government - except for legally mandated programs, and of course the war machine. And at a time when there's an urgent need for government investment in the economy, too many Democrats boast that they'd cut the deficit more than the Republicans would.
Most Americans think that millionaires and corporations should pay more in taxes. But even the President's tepid "Buffett rule," which only mandates they pay as much of a percentage as their secretaries, has no chance of passage. We won't be able to lower the deficit without taxing millionaires and billionaires more fairly.
Calling someone a "tax cutting deficit hawk" is like calling them a "vegetarian butcher." It doesn't make any sense.
Sure, the deficit needs to be addressed - after we've fixed our economic emergency. But making it our #1 priority now is like worrying about water conservation when your house is on fire.
Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. When it comes to the economy, we're losing altitude and the pilots want to point the nose down even further. The only thing they're debating is how much further down to aim. We have 311 million souls on board. We are in urgent need of assistance.
We're arguing over the scientifically-proven fact of climate change - even as tornadoes and hurricanes rip through our cities and towns. And with no apparent sense of irony, Congress keeps cutting funds for storm prediction and natural disaster response.
Bank deregulation created the financial crisis, while environmental deregulation allowed BP's greed and negligence to devastate the Gulf. Yet we keep on hearing stale rhetoric about "wasteful regulations" - mostly from Republicans, but quite a bit from Democrats too.
Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. Our cities and towns are defenseless against storms and floods. We're losing our protections against the environmental and economic devastation caused by unrestrained greed. We have 311 million souls on board. We are in urgent need of assistance.
Civil liberties? Our government reserves the right to kill anyone, even its own citizens, anywhere in the world. Nowadays its weapon of choice is the flying death-robot known as a "drone." And while it's been lenient enough not to kill most of us yet,software and digital technology are used every day to spy on our communications and our data.
Warrant? We don't need no stinkin' warrant!
Democracy? The Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling was the act of a body whose majority was selected for their willingness to impose corporate rule, as learned in radical groups like the Federalist Society. Their theory of "corporate personhood" says corporations have the right to speech - and their language is money.
Mitt agrees: "Corporations are people, my friend!" And, as we all know, people who need people are the luckiest people in the world ...
The political shock troops of corporate America even killed the idea of a "Disclose Act" to let us know which corporations are behind which campaigns.
If you still don't think we're living in a Catch-22 world, consider this: According to this interpretation of the law corporations are "people" who have the right to speak without ever being heard.
Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. This is the United States of America. Our democracy and economy are failing. Our lives are endangered by greed and weather. We are abandoning our old, our needy, our disabled, our young. Our blood and wealth are being squandered in deserts and mountains.
Our rights have been sacrificed. We're endangered by faceless corporate entities, by the technologies of espionage and intrusion and death. Out pilot and crew are under the influence of unseen forces. Our position is unknown and the time is growing short. We have 311 million souls on board. We are in urgent need of assistance.
In other news, we've been told that the White House Correspondents' Dinner was very entertaining.
Today is May 1, 2012. It's May Day. Mayday.
Richard (RJ) Eskow, a consultant and writer (and former insurance/finance executive), is a Senior Fellow with the Campaign for America's Future and the host of The Breakdown, broadcast Saturdays nights from 7-9 pm on WeAct Radio, AM 1480 in Washington DC.
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Follow Richard (RJ) Eskow on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rjeskow
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