Industrial Age

Earth Day Number 44—The Constant Battle Against Corporations

Ronald 12 Comments

Today is the 44th Earth Day, first promoted by Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, and endorsed by President Richard Nixon.

The environmental movement has had its successes under Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.

At the same time, the environmentalists have had major setbacks under Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, particularly under Reagan and the second Bush, the two worst environmental Presidents of the last century, while Carter and Nixon stand out as the best environmental Presidents after Theodore Roosevelt.

The corporate world has been responsible for much of the damage to our environment since the Industrial Age, with their mad dash for profits and lack of concern for the health and safety of the people in the areas they produced steel, mined coal, drilled oil, and the myriad of other industrial activities that produced a massive wealth ending up in the hands of a small oligarchy. They exploited their workers and took advantage of consumers, along with destruction of the environment, and without any apologies. And they still have massive influence with both parties, and any ability to deal with the issue of environmental damage is always counteracted by the financial resources of corporations out to prevent any major changes in policy and regulation.

So while progress has been made over these years since 1970, there is still a massive battle for the future of the nation’s environmental health over the long term. Environmentalists cannot let up their battles on Capitol Hill and in the courts!

Newt Gingrich Favors Bringing Back Child Labor To America! Is He For Real?

Ronald 1 Comment

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, the present frontrunner in some polls for the Republican Presidential nomination, has come out for the revival of child labor for children under the age of 14-16, as a way to promote the work ethic and earn some money.

Suggesting that younger children be employed to clean the schools they attend, replacing union employed janitors, Gingrich said it would promote pride in their schools and encourage learning for poor children. He called the present child labor laws, passed in 1938 under the Fair Labor Standards Act, “stupid”!

Imagine this, after a century of child labor laws, first passed on the national level under President Woodrow Wilson in 1916, declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the 1920s, and then finally established under Franklin D. Roosevelt, Newt Gingrich wants to go back to the days of children younger than 14 working and supporting their families, which aged them rapidly, caused dropouts from school, and denied them their childhood to have fun, to learn, to play, to grow up, before going to work as mid teenagers.

It has been shown that many high school students who work do poorly in school, and often drop out at age 16 or 17 without graduating high school, which just guarantees low income and poverty for the long haul of their lives.

Newt Gingrich stands for the “sweat labor” conditions of factories and mines in Great Britain and the United States, before social justice brought about the idea that children under 14 should not be acting as if they were adults, and should be encouraged to get an education.

While it is true that work never hurt anyone, it is outrageous and disgraceful that we should be advocating a return to the 19th century and early 20th century of the Industrial Age in the 21st century!

Have we come this far to go backwards and make for a class of poor children who will, effectively, be “serfs” for our schools, and making far less than the minimum wage?

It is obscene that Gingrich would have the gall to propose such a harsh idea, particularly for one who has never known what it is to work hard, other than to bloviate ad infinitum about his own virtues, and to make a career of promoting division and turmoil in his quest for wealth and attention from the American people!