The Bush administration is taking the ENRON approach to trying to stay on top against all odds. The strategy: ignore all warnings, claim all is well no matter how bad it is, pre-select your scapegoats (who won't know until its too late they have been selected), keep on sellin' stock in your operation based on phony accounting and reporting and, like Ken Lay and, for that matter, Tricky Dicky, just hope like hell to the bitter end you don't get caught. While the ENRON folks used bogus financial info counched as performance projections to pull the wool over the public's eyes, the Bush administration uses bogus info on all fronts couched as "news." Bush has a distinct advantage over Ken Lay in that he has all the mainstream media at his disposal to disseminate his bill of goods. Thus, week after week, we hear the same phony litany everywhere we turn, the same smears against supposed "US enemies," the same trumped up Bush approval polls, the same buzzphrases repeated over and over in a Hitlerian brainwashing campaign ("evildoers," "the Bush roadmap to peace," "We WILL find WMDs in Iraq", "Bush is a leader" and, lately, "liberals are pessimists" and "Democrats.can't compete with Bush's "leader image"), and the same people being endless interviewed on the same shows. On Sunday morning (May 4), for example, Colin Powell appeared simultaneously on "Meet the Press" and "Face the Nation," spouting this weeks "corrective spin". The Sunday shows have, in fact, become the favorite venue for rightwing spin, and are used to freely trash all things not Bush from the previous week, while all things Bush from the past days are freely puffed up or, if need be, explained away with a polished, pre-formulated script delivered in response to polished, pre-formulated questions by Tim Russert or Bob Shefer.

More disturbing still is that the so-called Sunday morning "light entertainment" magazine, "Sunday Morning" is now a vehicle for the "beginning of the week" propaganda dose. "Meet the Press" has Tim Russert, "Sunday Morning" has Charles "I Think I look So Cute and Boyish in My Bowtie!" Osgood. Osgood is a man with an obviously good grasp of what journalism should be all about - he's shown he CAN produce decent honest material. But since the Bush regime came to power, and especially over the past few months, his material on "Sunday Morning" has gone in a steady progression from being stuffily conservative to borderline jingoism to Goebbels-like propaganda. On May 4, Osgood went way, way over the line into the land of outright lies when he presented a story about the Haymarket Massacre, an historic American tragedy that occurred in Chicago on May 3-4 in 1886.

Here's Osgood's version, in a nutshell: A bunch of discontent labor activists demanding an 8-hour day staged a protest and four were killed (no details offered).. Outraged workers rallied the next day in Haymarket Square, but one of the protestors "threw a bomb", which caused the police to retaliate and fire on the protestors, leading to a squirmish in which 7 policemen were killed and "some protestors were injured." Osgood then says that the perpetrators of the bombing were rounded up, four were hung and the rest imprisoned, who were later released by the state's governor for lack of evidence. Osgood concludes this bit of Bushrubbish by saying that in 1938 labor finally got its 8-hour day without having to riot or commit more violence. If Osgood were an uneducated half-wit like the troglodytes who call in on the rightwing line at C-SPAN to spout misinformation, and if "Sunday Morning" was a Rush Limbaugh weekend special, I could just laugh it off . But Osgood knows better and chooses to misinform and spin. He is not just a willing, but an eager propagandist.

The true story of Haymarket could not honestly be told without at least granting the story two damn lines of background (which, of course, Osgood fails to do). The labor protests of the 1880s and later occurred during a time when conditions for American workers, especially in the urban factoriesand mines were routinely as bad and sometimes worse than those endured by black slaves before the Civil War. Adults and children alike worked 14-16 hour days with few breaks, for pennies an hour and with no overtime in overcrowded, poorly ventilated, poorly lit and dangerous factories or deathtrap mines. There was no workers comp, no sick pay. If you were ill, you were out of a job. If you lost an arm or leg or fingers to a machine, were crushed in a mining accident, or contracted black lung, too bad. Many workers lived in tenemant buildings owned by the factory barons, while mining communities were kept desperately poor and trapped by forced reliance on price-gouging "company stores.".In places like New York or Chicago, families of 10 or more might be crammed into two or three rooms in a tenemant apartment with a single small window and no heat, for which they might be charged a huge chunk of their salaries. The eight-hour day was a battlecry because it symbolized the ideal goal of labor - to have a life that was not owned by the company bosses.

As for Haymarket, Osgood conveniently left out the fact that the protests held there were just part of a much larger collection of nationwide worker mass demonstrations . This is a summary of the event from the Labor Standard: "On May 1, 1886, Albert Parsons, head of the Chicago Knights of Labor, led 80,000 people through the city’s streets in support of the eight-hour day. In the next few days they were joined nationwide by 350,000 workers who went on strike at 1,200 factories, including 70,000 in Chicago.". On May 4, the real story, as opposed to the Osgood bullshit, is extremely different: "On May 4, [August] Spies [editor of the Worker Newspaper], Parsons, and Samuel Fielden were speaking at a rally of 2,500 people held to protest the police massacre when 180 police officers arrived, led by the Chicago police chief. While he was calling for the meeting to disperse a bomb exploded, killing one policeman. The police retaliated, killing seven of their own in the crossfire, plus four others; almost two hundred were wounded. The identity of the bomb thrower remains unknown. "

No one knows who threw the bomb or if indeed anyone threw it. Some witnesses claimed the bomb simply went off ( like the gym bag bomb at the Atlanta Olympics). But Osgood's lie makes it obvious where he got his version of the massacre - from the ultrarightwing book "Why the Left Hates America" by By Daniel J. Flynn. This nasty little piece of work rewrites American labor history - including the May 4 event - according to the corporazi bosses, tying labor activism to the "American-hating left" and "commies." The book makes the case, in essence, that all those folks who decried the slave labor use of 6-year-olds in mines and factories or who felt that a man who put in a 70-hour week ought to at least be able to afford to eat, were "undermining America's greatness." Books like Flynn's are an insult to anyone with a social conscience and an IQ above room temperature. Yet, of course, it has become one of the favorite "manifestos" of the rightwingnuts, touted by every pro-corporate pundit /Bush groupie in the kingdom - including, apparently, Osgood.

But back to Haymarket. Many people present that day later said they believed the bomb had been planted by provocateurs. But the fact remains, only the police were armed with guns and the police who died that day were killed by "friendly fire" - not by protestors.

Another fact Osgood conveniently leaves out is that the trial of the workers was, in essence, a kangaroo court travesty so mishandled and full of contradictory "evidence" that the entire Chicago Bar Association condemned it. The other "little detail" left out by bowtie Charlie is that since the Haymarket tragedy, May 1st has been recognized as worker's day in almost every country around the world in honor of the protestors and wrongfully executed workers. In every country except the United States, that is. America was much slower than England, France and other developed countries to institute humane laws for workers, including banning child labor.

As to the eight-hour day being won peacefully, this is pure unadulterated horse shit. From 1886 through the 1930s, labor struggled continuously to win a decent break for workers and to establish the unions that were necessary to finally prevail against bosses like Andrew Carnegie, who scarcely saw workers as human beings. The struggle for decent working conditions over the 50 years that followed 1886 was marked by much violence, almost always against the workers. There's no mention by Charlie, of course, of the 1914 Ludlow massacre in Colorado in which 66 men, women and children in a striking mining camp were burned to death in a pit in a tent city by thugs hired by the mining bosses What about the protesting workers in Detroit in the 1930s beaten mercilessly by goons hired by GM and Ford? Or the hundreds of blacks lynched and otherwise murdered throughout the first two decades of the 20th century in retaliation for making a stand for black worker rights. The Jim Crow laws were, one by one, enacted from the 1890s through the early 20th century. They stripped blacks of fundamental rights, many of them related to their right to work. But Osgood and Flynn, no doubt believe that the "left's" outrage at these laws was just one more effort to "undermine America's greatness."). Labor protests greeted by armed goons, police ordered to shoot to kill, and savage retaliations by both bosses and the judicial system they controlled occurred everywhere in America for decades before FDR, in his second term, pushed through the labor laws that make life bearable for millions today.

By the way, corporations then were just as terrified to have FDR win a second term as corporations now are terrified that Bush will not win a second term. In the election of 1935, the corporations financed one of the most aggressive anti-labor, anti-social security, anti-liberal smear campaigns ever launched - at least until now. They pumped millions into a propaganda campaign extremely similar to the one being conducted by the Bush regime and its buddies now. Why? Because they knew their era of making huge profits off the misery of their workers would come to a close with the fair labor acts.

Thus Osgood is participating in pre-election 2004 propaganda campaign that is a direct counterpart to the pre-1935 election propaganda campaign. This anti-labor, anti-left assault is bound to get much uglier as the months pass. You can expect labor activism and union formation to somehow be linked to terrorism in coming months, while anti-union companies such as Wal-Mart receive more and more positive coverage. Expect anyone advocating a living wage for workers (such as the janitors in DC) to be smeared as "undermining the economy", while legislation is quietly pushed through that devastates small businesses (true small businesses, not the mid-sized corporations now scooping up most of the government largesse under the heading of small businesses). Expect non-unionized military contractors to be touted as saviors of the economy, while anyone questioning the monopoly on defense contracts enjoyed by Bush's pals to be condemned as "anti-success" (the new buzzphrase of the Freepers to protect Halliburton or the Carlyle Group). Expect the Catholic church to be subjected to a renewed slamming under the guise of "pedophile priest hunting" - the Catholics have a strong pro-labor history with the Catholic Worker movement now an American legend. In short, expect anything in any form from the media in terms of labor bashing between now and election 2004.

Which brings me back to "Sunday Morning." The Osgood piece clearly seemed aimed at undermining the reality of America's labor history and, far worse, at intimidating blue collar workers - a group that has increasingly little use for the Bush corporazis. To Bush, workers are fair game: unlike their bosses, they have no big bucks to spend on promoting his political career and are highly unlikely to back him in 2004. The long lingering shot aired by Osgood of a photo of the condemned workers with bags over their heads was an obvious, chilling warming. But it is only a more menacing and graphic version of warnings routinely received now by underpaid, under-benefited non-Union workers in the service sector . A close friend of mine who worked for Wal-Mart a few years back said he was told that if he so much as approached a union rep, just to pass the time of day, he would be fired on the spot. Yet Wal-mart's continuing abuses of their huge force of underpaid workers is becoming a chronic problem - in fact the company is currently fielding several lawsuits - lawsuits the multi-billion-dollar corporation can easily afford, unlike the workers left with no other greivance recourse.

The "brave new world" envisioned by Bush and his pals is one where workers, stripped of rights and recourses, with most jobs shipped overseas, will be so grateful for any job, that the bosses will be able to call all the shots again - just as they did pre-1938. People living in poor areas of the US already know what this scenario is like. In these areas jobs have either all been shipped to other regions or replaced by corporate "operations." In northern Maine, the big paper companies came in and took over and kicked out the thousands of small-time woodsmen who made decent livings and replaced them with a few mechanized operations featuring mega-skidders able to do the work of hundreds of men with chainsaws, while leveling the forest. The malls and the big box stores like Wal-Mart turned downtown areas of places like Bangor into empty storefront-ridden black holes. Little local businesses were replaced by corporations with offices in New York or elsewhere who have most of their goods shipped in from overseas. Now people who want to stay in Northern Maine must compete for the few, largely benefitless service sector jobs available. As a result, you have people with masters or pHDs competing for a $6.50/hour job at a Barnes and Noble, or 1,000 guys lined up at the paper mill when a single job with decent pay and all the dioxin-laced air you can breathe opens up. Mainers and people from other poor regions are usually known as "real hard workers." Fact is, they often work themselves into an early grave or permanent disability just out of sheer fear of job loss and because the companies demand it (until a few years back, MAine's workman's comp claims were, the highest in the nation due to the overwork and underprotection of workers). But few complain because to do so often means instant job loss....with dozens of unemployed or underemployed workers just outside the door, eager to take your place. And no union to bring a grievance to. But I guess bowtie Charlie and Flynn would that's just another symptom of America's "greatness," eh?

Is this the environment we want to bring our children and grandchildren into when it comes time for them to make a living? I for one don't - I left Maine for that very reason. When you see a 17-year-old girl being threatened with firing by the Shop n' Save "overseers" for not pushing a big line of shopping carts up a hill fast enough in an ice storm when the wind chill was 30-below, you know something is very wrong with the labor situation. But, if Bush is allowed to fully pursue his agenda, using even the Sunday morning "light TV" programs to do so, we will wake up one morning and find we are back in the world of 1886 all over again. In that world, there will be millions more young people pushing lines of shopping carts up icy hillsides under the whip - literally and figuratively.