If Gerald Ford was trying to live down his image as a bumbler, he made a curious choice of dying right after Christmas when most of the half-way decent reporters must be on vacation. On a good day, the New York Times annoys the crap out of me, but a couple of doozies slipped in that have really driven me nuts.

In a television column that itself comments on how substitutes are reporting the news of Ford’s death, reporter Alessandra Stanley notes:

On “Today” the NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell mentioned that she last spoke to Mr. Ford in California last February, “when he came over to see me, and we had lunch.” (It is hard to imagine a former president in his 90s going out of his way to meet a television reporter, so it was hard not to suspect that Mr. Ford was going out of his way not to invite Ms. Mitchell over to his house.)

How clever? What a fucking idiot! Either she doesn’t know that Andrea Mitchell is married to the then-Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, or else she was intentionally obscuring how cozy journalists and official Washington can get. Either way, it’s outrageous.

More outrageous is Sam Roberts’ attempt to exonerate Ford for his role in New York City’s fiscal crisis. Yes, it’s technically true that, just as Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake,” Ford never told New York to “Drop Dead,” but their actions and policies made clear the contempt that was summed up in the better copy that the journalists of their day (far better than this sorry lot) screamed in headlines. His defenders may insist that he “liked New York,” but insisting that the city raise the subway fare (part of the completely separate and solvent MTA budget), raise CUNY tuition, end rent control and hack away at public hospitals, museums and social services showed real – I’ll say it again – contempt for what New York stood for politically and for its heroic effort to be more than a playground for the rich and famous.

Roberts finds a number of people to praise Ford’s neoliberal hatchet job, mostly the politicians who subsequently turned New York into a playground for the rich and famous, but makes no attempt for balance. There is no questioning the wisdom of drastic cuts in public spending, nor the dubious “fact” that the crisis was the product of “inevitable hemorrhaging inflicted by bankrupt liberalism” (rather than a conspiracy of a handful of big banks that encouraged the city’s debt and then without warning demanded their money back).

The only voice of dissent slips in, almost by accident, from 30 years ago in DC37 chief Victor Gotbaum’s witty complaint that the Ford administration aimed to shrink government down to just police and fire protection, “and he’s not sure about fire.”

David McReynolds laments the now-obvious gap in his record collection, and asks where is a good place to start with James Brown. And, since he also laments the lack of consideration of arts and culture in our little corner of the the movement, and I need an excuse to get my nose out of health care policy textbooks, I’m wrtiting to recommend “JB40.”

Ordinarily, I agree with that old “Kids in the Hall” joke that “Greatest hits are for housewives and little girls,” but Brown’s career is so expansive and encompasses so many distinct periods that no regular album could serve as a proper introduction. In fact, I just had this conversation with Alan Amalgamated last Friday, and if I were superstitious I would think that I cursed James Brown to die two days later. I’m a “jinxy motherfucker,” Alan says.

To avoid the crap that passes for radio, Alan and I make mixtapes for each other on our carpools out to lawnguyland. My inclusion of “Say It Loud” (yes, I may be as pale as a corpse, but that song is awesome and I do sing along, “I’m Black and I’m proud.”) inspired Alan to posit that the two most influential drummers of the modern era were John Bonham and the guy that drummed for James Brown. He’s the drummer, so he’s qualified to speak about Bonham (I find Zeppelin too wonky and boring), but the sad truth is that the unnamed, unknown drummer for James Brown, whose work is sampled in so many hip hop songs, was at least two different guys. Brown rather famously fired his crack soul band in the late 1960′s for striking for better treatment from their bandleader.

The tight, tight, tight band of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “Night Train” and “I Got You (I Feel Good)” were conditioned by the stern Godfather of Soul’s fining them for any missed beat or bum note. When they demanded that this practice stop, they were summarily fired by JB. His cocky young bassist, Bootsie Collins, promised to put together a new band for his bandleader. The result was a looser, funkier sound. By simply changing bands, James Brown invented a new genre of music: funk. He is a towering influence over popular music, and (this is how I “cursed” him) I wondered on Friday, “What the hell happened to James Brown?”

This man invented new genres on the fly. He famously rented out the Apollo and other venues for weeks at a time, hired his own staff and promotors and sold his own tickets in order to prevent his art and business from being exploited. He appealed for calm after Martin Luther King’s assassination. He sang chillingly about the destruction that “King Heroin” wrought in the ghettoes. One day folks were “colored,” then he put out the record “Say It Loud” and suddenly folks were Black and Proud. How did he allow himself to become a walking punchline in his later years? The drug addiction. The mugshots, police chases and jail time. The spouse abuse. “Living in America.”

Perhaps now that he has mercifully passed on, younger generations can finally embrace what was cool, proud and noble about him, much as Johnny Cash and Ray Charles experienced career resurgence in death (but please spare us the Hollywood movie).

It turns out that “JB40″ is out of print. I’m sure there will soon be dozens of collections, anthologies and rehashes put out to capitalize on Brown’s death. Some may be good, some will certainly be cheap and poorly chosen. Do yourself a favor and look in the used racks for a copy of “JB40″ if you want a satisfying overview of James Brown’s entire, fascinating career.

The Guardian of London has a heart-warming seasonal story about a small town called North Pole in Alaska, where it’s Christmas 365 days a year and all the town’s residents (including the school children) answer “letters to Santa” that come in from around the world. Last spring, a group of about a dozen of North Pole’s sixth graders were caught “making a list and checking it twice.” Their Columbine-style massacre plot was narrowly thwarted. Perhaps the incessant holiday “cheer” drove them to it, writer Jon Ronson wonders?

I was thinking about North Pole while doing some grocery shopping this morning in Kew Gardens, the Land Where It’s Never Christmas. All the shops are open as normal. Perhaps they’ll close an hour early for the big day in deference to the rest of society. There are no Santas around, the streetlights are plain and unadorned and almost no houses are decorated. It’s bliss. This is a less-advertised perk of living in a majority Jewish neighborhood (and, being Queens, those who aren’t Jewish are Hindu, Sikh, Taoist, Buddhist and Stewardess). Sure, it’s hell to find parking on a Friday night, but you won’t be driven bonkers by the whole “X-Mas Atmos.”

Serving on my co-op’s board, it has come to my attention that my apartment has probably doubled in value in the last three years. If we promote this whole “No Christmas” thing the way that North Pole promotes its “Year-round Christmas” thing, we could probably redouble our home values with all the Scrooges beating a path to our doors. But if I ever do sell, someone please remind me of this post. Just start singing “Jingle Bells,” and my Pavlovian response will kick in: “Never leave Kew Gardens.”

The other day I was debating who might be the “most influential bands of the 90′s,” which is a more polite way of saying “whose fault are the 00′s (uh-oh’s),” which is awfully unfair to a host of excellent bands. It’s not their fault that popular music fractured into a multitude of sub-genres, or that mass media melted down into niches like blogs and podcasts. It’s certainly not their fault that rock and roll is a highly derivative art form, for they did not choose their followers.

Easily, one of the most influential bands of the 90′s was Pavement. Slackers, shoegazers, ironic smartasses – it’s almost as if they bothered to draw up the blueprints for modern indie sensibilities. But they were too busy getting stoned and covering “School House Rock” songs. A lot of misguided critics and fans expected Pavement to do something Important ten years ago. Following a series of overdubbed home recordings and lo-fi e.p.s in the early 90′s, then band released two excellent long players, which offered increasingly competent musicianship and mysterious, occasionally cheeky, lyrics that hinted at greater depth and empathy. Real voice of a generation shit.

But 1995′s “Wowee Zowee” was a rambling, shambolic mess. Anything resembling a message was lost in the cacophony of genre pastiches and rubbish lyrics. The critics howled in disgust, the casual listeners dropped away and Pavement settled into the comfortable niche of cult artists. Ten years on, “Wowee Zowee” sounds like the band’s greatest artistic statement – precisely by not saying much of anything. It’s just a lot of jamming on good grooves, and occasionally throwing out an interesting turn of phrase. Matador Records continues to reissue Pavement’s albums in deluxe editions that include b-sides, demos and outtakes. The “Sordid Sentinels” edition of “Wowee Zowee” finally places the excellent single “Painted Soldiers” (which was promoted with a funny video of Spiral Stairs firing the other members of the band) on a proper Pavement album. Other highlights include an Australian radio set puts Malkmus on lead vocals for a strangely Lou Reed-ish “My Best Friend’s Arm” in which one can finally make out the lyrics (“Mt. Holyoke is my favorite friend and a college?”) and an acoustic demo of “Fight This Generation” that sounds more sinister than sarcastic.

It should not have come as a surprise that Pavement would settle for cult status. A formative influence on Stephen Malkmus was the ultimate cult band, the Fall. A first wave punk band from Manchester, centered around the prickly personality of Mark E. Smith and his mostly paid associates, the Fall are the kind of cult that brainwashes. The typical Fall song drones on repetitively around a catchy groove while Smith growls and howls something incomprehensible and (if you’re lucky) Brix Smith coos a beautiful harmony. The new(ish) double-disc collection, “50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Can’t Be Wrong” provides the easiest indoctrination into the cult of Mark E. Smith.

This article was originally published in the January-February 2003 issue of “The Socialist.”

The recent announcement by the trust that operates the Hershey Industrial School that it was considering selling a large stake in the Hershey Foods Corporation set off waves of protest in the town of Hershey, PA, that eventually sunk the proposal. What kind of company town has effective veto power over its corporate benefactor’s business plans? Clearly, Hershey is a company town like know other.

To understand it better, one should place the town’s history in the context of the social reform movement of the turn of the century that formed alternative model communities founded with the aims of conquering the abject poverty and gross inequalities of the era’s great cities. The most identifiable are the socialist cooperatives like Robert Owen’s New Harmony, IN and Job Harriman’s New Llanos, CA, but socialists did not have a monopoly on alternative city building. The towns of Pullman, IL – best known now for the disastrous American Railway Union strike that turned Eugene Debs towards socialism – and Hershey, PA – best known now as the poor man’s Disneyworld – were themselves social experiments.

When the Pullman Sleeping Car Company needed to expand in 1880, initial plans had the company simply building its factory complex with the city of St. Louis. Paternalism and arrogance drove George Pullman to instead build a new city that he thought would be free of alcoholism, crime, poverty and labor strife. Ironically, it was his devotion to the city of his creation that brought on the strike of 1893. Had Pullman’s factory been located in St. Louis, he would no doubt have simply laid off thousands of employees during the national depression that was causing profits to plummet, but as it was the main employer and economic engine for a community he built and felt responsible for, the company instead embarked on a plan for work sharing. Wage rates were never cut, but weekly pay for employees was severely reduced because of reduced hours.

The conventional story of the strike is that Pullman reduced his employees’ pay without lowering rent on the company-owned homes where many employees lived. However, the vast majority of employees lived in two adjoining towns that had sprung up around Pullman, where they could own their own homes, as well as avoid the company’s overbearing meddling in their private lives and morality, and, anyway, the company never evicted a single employee during the resulting rent strike. The strike was more a result of pent-up frustration with the company’s dominant role in all aspects of life in Pullman.

The famous strike was eventually put down by the National Guard, and work resumed at Pullman’s factory, but the town was never the same. George Pullman died in 1897, resentful of his reputation as a tyrant and the reputation of his model town as an oppressive fiefdom. One year later, the Illinois Supreme Court ordered the company to sell all land not involved in the production at the factory, and the town shortly blended into the rest of Chicago, as an industrial slum.

The Sweetest Place on Earth
Amazingly, just a few years after Pullman died, another self-made businessman decided to build a model company town of his own. Friends warned Milton Hershey that the Pullman town had been a disaster and a black mark on the Pullman name, and that Pullman’s residents wouldn’t have elected George Pullman dogcatcher. “I know we’re taking chances,” replied Hershey, “but I won’t be a candidate for dog catcher: I don’t like dogs that much.”

When Milton Hershey decided to build his model town, the name “Hershey” was not yet synonymous with milk chocolate. Indeed, in 1900 the world did not yet know milk chocolate. Chocolate was a luxurious treat for the wealthy. Milton Hershey had made a fortune with a caramel business, which he sold for the unprecedented sum of one million dollars in 1900. Although he retained rights to a small chocolate subsidiary, it specialized in novelty chocolates and was something of a hobby for Hershey, who simply planned to spend his wealth and the rest of his life touring the world with his wife.

For some reason, Hershey abandoned the idea of conspicuous consumption and opulent travel and, like George Pullman, became interested in solving the problems of modern industrial life. Thus, Milton Hershey started the Hershey Chocolate Co. to support his town, not vice versa. Hershey worked on a formula for milk chocolate that could be mass-produced, to provide his town with sustainable industry.

Ground broke on the new town in 1903, near its own source of dairy farms in Pennsylvania Dutch land. The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad served Hershey, at the request of Milton Hershey. Hershey also built a trolley system.

At the center of town was a 150 acre park, featuring a band shell, golf course and a zoo. Hershey continued to add attractions, and by 1913, the park was receiving 100,000 visitors a year, giving Hershey a second industry: tourism. Hershey built banks, department stores and public schools. In addition, he built training schools like the Hershey Industrial School, a generous boarding school for orphans.

In fact, when Hershey’s wife died in 1915 he donated his entire estate – 30 years before his own death – to the Milton Hershey School Trust, which operated the Hershey Industrial School. This strange, quiet act of philanthropy had the peculiar effect of creating a corporate giant that is to this day owned by an orphanage. The result is that the town of Hershey and the Hershey Foods Corp. are more closely tied than one might believe possible in this era of free trade.

Hershey, PA is no stranger to labor strife, however. In a case of history repeating itself, Hershey was the target of a strike by a radical labor union – this time the CIO – during a depression – this time the Great Depression. Despite the fact that Hershey laid off no workers and made no wage cuts, Hershey, PA was caught up in the wave of sit down strikes and Communist agitation. In April of 1937, 600 workers took control of the factory for five days. The strike was broken not by the National Guard, but by angry farmers (who were losing 800,000 pounds of milk a day) and workers loyal to the company, who broke into the factory and beat-up and forcibly removed the strikers. Hershey eventually signed a contract with the more conservative AFL.

Despite this black mark, the town of Hershey, PA is a modest success. Though by no means the utopia Hershey envisioned, the town exists today as a successful tourist destination and the chocolate factory continues pumping out product, and providing the town with a base for industrial jobs.

It may be easy for a reader who is normally critical of the role of corporations in public life to romanticize the example of Hershey, PA. Certainly, the relationship between the Hershey Company and the town of Hershey is an admirable one when compared to Flint, MI and General Motors. Also, since the established rules of the new global economy eschew corporate-community ties, we can be pretty sure that experiments like these are a thing of the past.

In fact, it was the rule of law that nearly caused the Hershey School to sell the company this past summer. The rules of “fiduciary responsibility” that have bedeviled stockholders’ “corporate responsibility” efforts caused Pennsylvania Attorney General, Mike Fisher, to pressure the trust to diversify its holdings, the majority of which are Hershey stock. It was enough to have business observers, like the Wall Street Journal, salivating over the merger possibilities, as well as the influx of Hershey Trust cash in a soft market. It also came at a time that Hershey workers were fighting out the longest strike in company history, over proposed health plan cutbacks, proposed by the first non-Hershey resident CEO in the company’s history. Whatever respite Hershey workers and residents have won seems likely to be short-lived.

This is his testimony. In 1991, Jon Langford and his mates from Leeds, the Mekons, had just missed their opportunity as rock-n-roll’s latest last best hope. After almost 15 years of lineup changes, a bunch of classic albums with lousy distribution, countless raucous alcohol-soaked tours and stylistic shifts from punk to country, dance and back, the Mekons were on the verge of saving rock music from big hair and empty heads when fights with A&M Records left their newest record without an outlet in the U.S., just as Nirvana opened up the radio to so-called “alternative rock.” They called that record “The Curse of the Mekons,” but their contract problems and bad luck didn’t piss them off as much as the fall of the Soviet Union and the media’s declaration of the “death of socialism.” “How can something really be dead when it hasn’t even happened,” long-time lefty Langford demands in the album’s highlight, “Funeral,” which concludes, “This funeral is for the wrong corpse!”

Last year marked the Mekons’ 25th anniversary, and Jon Langford has continued to be busier than ever. His Pine Valley Cosmonauts assembled an impressive line-up of underground country artists – including Neko Case and Steve Earle – released a well-received anti-death penalty benefit album, “The Executioner’s Last Songs,” early last year, and later in the year, he brought back many of the same artists to record, “The Bottle Let Me Down,” a tongue-in-cheek children’s album that parents could stomach. His alt.country band, the Waco Brothers, just wrapped up a tour on which Langford pulled double duty, playing in support of the Waco’s sixth disc, “New Deal,” as well as playing with tour openers the Sadies, with whom he just released a collaboration titled, “The Mayors of the Moon.” And, last fall, the Mekons marked their silver jubilee not with a compilation looking back on their career, but with an album of new material, “Out of Our Heads,” and a world club tour.

The Mekons Story
Langford spoke with The Socialist from his home in Chicago, on the eve of the Mekons’ tour. The Mekons, he says, were formed in punk’s first wave, with the idea that, “Your favorite band didn’t have to be people you never meet.” Indeed, the band got its start when schoolmates Langford, Tom Greenhaigh and Kevin Lycett borrowed their favorite band’s (and good friends), the Gang of Four’s, instruments to practice and record their new songs. The art school punk scene in Leeds, centered on the Mekons and Gang of Four, was more political, more intellectual and more danceable than London’s.

In the early days, Langford, Greenhaigh and Lycett released a string of 7″ singles, recorded on simple two track equipment, using borrowed instruments and whatever friends they could rope into the session to fill out the band. Their first single, “Never Been in a Riot,” was a piss-take on the Clash’s “White Riot.” Langford says he has always disliked the romantic outsider stance of punk and some of its thoughtless rhetoric. “When you say ‘smash the system,’” he asks, “what the fuck are you talking about? The national health system?” He found the same problem in parts of the organized left. “I was in the Socialist Workers Party for about half an hour,” quips Langford, who describes himself as a Welsh socialist and an “unaffiliated lefty.”

The Mekons’ early singles attracted the attention of Virgin Records, which released their first album in 1979. Its title, “The Quality of Mercy is Not Strnen,” a reference to that old axiom about a thousand monkeys, a thousand typewriters and a work of Shakespeare, was also a commentary on the band’s limited aptitude and everybody-pick-an-instrument-and-play style. Another album followed, but the band fizzled as England’s gig scene grew violent and they became financially dependent on a record label that didn’t know what to do with them. They broke up in 1982, and moved on to new projects. Langford even sold his drums to the goth band Sisters of Mercy, who painted them black.

However, “even when the band thought we split up,” says Langford, “we hadn’t.” The band members continued to hang out and work on art projects together. They even did a few live shows as the Mekons to benefit the striking miners. In 1985, the Mekons made a startling comeback as a country band. They added talented new members, such as Steve Goulding on drums, Susie Honeymoon on fiddle, and singer Sally Timms and released “Fear and Whiskey” on their own independent record label. The album was Hank Williams distilled through punk rock. “Country music struck quite a few chords at that point in our lives,” he says, as a string of broken relationships and too much hard drinking resulted in songs that were stark and personal, but also warm – not to mention musically accomplished.

Two more country albums followed, with better distribution in America, as did other sounds and influences. “Once we got past the first Year Zero days of punk,” he says, “we started to get into the idea of folk music, dance music, reggae.” Along with the new sounds came new members, who seemed to come and go at a rate that could populate several new bands a year, although Langford bristles at the idea that there have been that many personnel changes. “It’s kind of an open door policy, but there’s a core of people,” he says, although he likes the idea of adding younger members and having the band go on. “Here’s the Mekons,” he jokes, “with no one from the Mekons.”

The Curse of the Mekons
Their work in the 80′s made the Mekons critical darlings with a cult-like fan following, and brought them to A&M records. Their first album for A&M should have made them stars. “Destroy your safe and happy lives,” they demanded on the opening track of “The Mekons’ Rock and Roll.” The album was packed full of super-charged rock and rave-ups, but, ever the intellectuals, the band deconstructed their chosen art form throughout the album. One track offers a prostitution analogy for rock-n-roll; others use imperialism and consumerism. “The battles we fought were long and hard, just not to be consumed by rock and roll,” goes one refrain. Unfortunately, their second experience on a corporate record label proved to be more frustrating than the Virgin days. The album’s cover art, which incorporated a licensed image of Elvis Presley, tied the album up in lawsuits and delayed its release. When it finally hit record stores, it was poorly promoted.

More battles with A&M followed. The band wanted to release more albums. The label wanted fewer. Of course, the label also wanted more commercial material. A&M declined to release “Curse of the Mekons,” and it was available in America only as an import for a decade. The Mekons’ curse continued when they moved from A&M to Loud Records, a short-lived subsidiary of Warner Brothers, which tied them up in red tape for two years and never released a single note of music recorded by the band. When the Mekons were finally released from their contract, they immediately released the superb “I (Heart) Mekons” on the independent Touch and Go Records label and never looked back.

“I don’t work for major labels anymore,” Langford says today. Despite his own problems with the major labels over the years, he says he’s mostly uninvolved with the recent artists’ rebellion at the major labels. “There’s such a disparity between musicians,” he says, “that I don’t quite feel a part of that Don Henley struggle.” Still, he’s incredulous at the way the system is set up. “Somebody gives you some money,” he explains, “which you then owe them, to make something which they then own. I can understand why someone who sells three million records gets pissed off.”

Langford manages to eke out a living for himself through his art. “My wife will kill me if I do any more work for no money. For my next benefit album I have to do,” he jokes, “I promised her I’d embezzle all the money.” Working for indie labels, he says that he receives modest royalty checks about six months after a record is released, but that he would have to record about four or five records a year in order for that money to translate into a living wage. His biggest source of money recently was the use of two Waco Brothers songs in episodes of the HBO series “Sex and the City,” which, after repeats and DVD releases, translated in a “sizeable” royalty check.

Heaven and Back
These days, Langford, like the rest of the Mekons, no longer lives in Leeds. He moved to Chicago in 1992 to be with his then-girlfriend, Helen, who is now his wife. The couple has two children, 5-year-old Jimmy and newborn Tommy. He says that it’s because of his children that he finally became involved in U.S. political issues, most notably the campaign to end the death penalty. “I felt like it’s time I should step up,” he says, describing it as a “winnable fight.” On “The Executioner’s Last Songs,” Langford assembled over a dozen Chicago-area alternative country artists, along Nashville’s Steve Earle among others, to cover classic songs about murder and mayhem, with the proceeds benefiting the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty. Langford speaks very warmly of the Chicago music scene, which he feels has even more of a sense of community than the old punk days in Leeds.

“I’m a socialist because I believe in a sense of community,” he says. “I think a community needs to look after people, rather than rip them off. It’s as simple as that.” His sense of community is underscored by his strong identification with the three places he has called home over the years. “I feel like Chicago’s the only place I could live in America,” he says. Ten years in, Chicago (and America) are as much a part of his identity as Leeds and Wales, whose working class identity and “people got to work, people got to eat” ethos he credits for his socialist politics.

Jon Langford will continue to be an activist in the U.S. on his own terms, and despite his own ambivalence about the organized left. “A lot of people on the left seem to fear musicians and artists, for some reason, as being free spirits, or kinda sneer at them for not being intellectually rigorous,” he says. “Music reflects social change,” he explains. “I don’t think it instigates social change, but you can be a morale builder.”

This article was originally published in the March-April 2003 issue of “The Socialist.”

In the movie “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” Willy Wonka employs in his factory Oompa Loompas, strange little orange men who seemingly work for free. The Oompa Loompas, who sing while they work, seem to be charged with much manual labor.

They mix the chocolate and other confections, carry out Wonka’s orders, manually power his personal yacht and otherwise do his bidding-all at the beck and call of his whistle. After seeing just one minute of the movie with the Oompa Loompas on the screen, one obsesses about this work arangement. Are these Oompa Loompas slaves, or indentured servants? Are they salaried employees? Is this some Stalinist work camp?

Wonka answers this question himself early on when several visitors on a tour of his factory raise these troubling issues. The Oompa Loompas, he explains, come from a far off place called “Lumpaland,” where, because of their diminutive size, they were in constant danger of being gobbled up by assorted “fierce creatures.” And so, in what he would have us believe was an altruistic gesture, he “freed” them from their native land and had them brought to his factory in the “greatest of secrecy,” where they could live in “peace and safety”…and become his new source of labor.

Were the pint-sized immigrants scabs? It is explained earlier in the movie that years ago Wonka had fired all of his employees, charging them with industrial espionage; trading secrets with his chief competitor, Slugworth, Inc. Wonka closed his doors and ceased production. Three years later, the factory began production again, but, mysteriously to the public, without hiring workers and without opening its doors. At this point, it seems clear that Wonka brought in the Oompa Loompas to solve his labor problems, and kept his doors closed to keep nosy government investigators out in order to keep his little sweat shop running.

The Oompa Loompas certainly seem to be property. In fact, one of the guests on the tour of the plant, bratty Veruca Salt, demands that her father buy her one. He complies and actually haggles with Wonka to purchase one of the little orange men. But Willy Wonka strangely refuses! Is this mere greed, a desire to keep all the hard working Oompa Loompas to himself? The answer comes shortly when Wonka takes his guests to his top secret laboratory. On the door is a large sign, clearly stating, “Top Secret: No Unauthorized Oompa Loompas Allowed Inside.” Behind the door toil dozens of Oompa Loompas. Clearly not your average slaves, they’re actually busy mixing and inventing new candies! These Oompa Loompas are skilled artisans, setting their own hours and work loads.

Evil slave-driver?
How is it that Wonka trusts the Oompa Loompas with such trade secrets as the formula of the “Everlasting Gobstopper,” but fired his human workers out of mistrust. Wonka openly fears that Slugworth will learn his secret formulas. Either international patent and copyright laws don’t exist here, or they don’t apply to these candies. (A third possibility that Wonka never thought to patent his creations seems too far-fetched.) In any event, the result is clear: in order to maintain the massive rent on his products, the kind of rent that makes new products and marketing schemes t.v. news and causes panics in candy stores when the supply “Scrum Diddlyumptious” bars has run out, Wonka must rely on secrecy. He shows that he will go to any length to
maintain secrecy. He has already displaced hundreds of factory workers.
He uses fear and intimidation on his guests on the tour, as well as the general public. And yet he trusts the Oompa Loompas with his trade secrets.

Abused worker?
This was doubtless part of his arrangement with the Oompa Loompas when
he brought them to work for him. Freedom from fierce creatures in exchange for labor. Labor in exchange for housing. And since the Oompa Loompas remain within the Wonka factory and on the Wonka property at all times, there was no way they could trade secrets with the enemy. Wonka, a true capitalist, had fully exploited the immigrant workers!

Or had he? There is a clear dichotomy between the unskilled Oompa Loompas who mix the candy, power Wonka’s yacht and otherwise toil away, and the skilled artisan Oompa Loompas who invent the candy, set their own hours and have the run of the place. These Oompa Loompas are clearly the intellectual superiors of the unskilled variety. Surely, they must appreciate their own situation. They hold in their minds and hands the very information that could ruin Wonka. If they were displeased with the pay or treatment they got from him, they could easily find work elsewhere. Slugworth would, in Wonka’s own words, “give his false teeth” to learn Wonka’s trade secrets, as well as double the pay and benefits of the Oompa Loompas who could be the key to a greater market share.

It would seem that these Oompa Loompas had come to appreciate their fortunate situation and made a deal with Wonka, a little “partnership between labor and capital if you will. And all they had to do was sell out their brother workers, the unskilled Oompa Loompas to achieve it. So, the skilled Oompa Loompas got the best pay, hours, and, one would assume, choice lodging, while the unskilled variety got the shaft.

And yet, they seem so happy. They actually sing while they work. They sing, in fact, about how great it is to work for Wonka and how everyone should be like the “Oompa Loompa doopity doo.” (Okay, they’re not the best songwriters in the world.) This is what gave the impression at first that Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory was a Stalinist work camp, that the workers believe their exploitation to be freedom. The Oompa Loompa’s songs could be characterized as agit-prop.

It isn’t Stalinist propaganda, but something very similar. The workers are singing about labor’s goals being the same as management’s. That’s how Wonka and the skilled Oompa Loompas got them to go along with the
agreement! You’re job security depends on the success of this company, they must have been told. Sacrifices had to be made for profits. After all, if the company made no profits, the Oompa Loompas would be out of a job, and thrown back to Lumpaland. Now that’s motivation!

There seems to be one thing missing from this whole scenario. I used the term “brother worker” intentionally. All the Oompa Loompas we see in the film are males. Discounting the possibility that Oompa Loompas are radically different from us anatomically, there must be female Oompa Loompas. Where are they? It may be safe to assume that this is the final part of the arrangement between Wonka and the Oompa Loompa overseers. It is, by this point, clear that they are salaried workers, paid, albeit unequally, in food, shelter, clothing and protection. These payments for their work is not only for them, but their families. Wonka only puts the adult males to work. The women and children do not have to work.

Now, let’s put on our econimist hats and put this little arrangement into perspective. From the little we see of the world outside the Factory, using Charlie (who doesn’t seem to have a last name) and his family as an example of the typical family, women and children had to work as well. Charlie has a paper route, and his mother took in laundry. These two incomes had to provide for six people: Charlie, his mother, and four bedridden grandparents. (All four in the same bed. Kinky.) There is no father evident in this family. He presumably had to leave town when Wonka closed his factory and the job market soured. But, assuming that the father was in the picture three years prior and worked at the Wonka factory, his earnings would not have to provide for seven people alone. That burden was shared with his wife and son. So, previously, Wonka was paying his human workers enough money necessary to produce and reproduce just themselves for another day of labor.
Given the population density of this area and its presumed saturation of the job market, the existence of a labor union is doubtful, and the wages doubtlessly depressed, so Wonka could easily pay his workers that little. Let’s use as the sum of the wages paid ten Wonka dollars per worker per day. This labor afforded Wonka a commanding share of the chocolate market, however, it was beginning to cost him his rent. So Wonka downsized his entire workforce.

Now, with the Oompa Loompas employed as labor, Wonka had to pay enough money to produce and reproduce each Oompa Loompa and his family.
Assuming a typical Oompa Loompa family of husband, wife and 2.3 children, and assuming that an Oompa Loompa, being half the size of a human worker needs only half the food, shelter and clothing, Wonka would be paying each Oompa Loompa 21 and a half Wonka dollars per day, or, its equivalent in food, shelter and clothing. This is also assuming that Wonka employed an equivalent number of Oompa Loompas as humans. For this increase of $11.50W per worker per day, Wonka gets serious increases in productivity.

For the human worker, Wonka got ten hours work for $10W pay. This is
assuming that Wonka is a fairly liberal employer in a rather Dickensian
atmosphere. Given that the Oompa Loompa worker lives where he works, and also given that the Oompa Loompa sees a personal stake in the success of the company, he obviously works harder and longer than the human worker. At this point, any speculation as to the amount of the increase in productivity would go way beyond merely bordering on absurdity, but sufficed to say, it would be substantial. And it would give Wonka a permanent edge over competitor Slugworth, whose human workers could never keep up.

The other edge it would give Wonka is the aforementioned rent. With workers that can not only be counted on to create new candies but to keep the formulas for said candies top secret, Wonka can retain his huge market share and status as a popular icon of confectionery capitalism, and leave Slugworth permanently in a distant second. The benefits to Wonka are obvious.

For the Oompa Loompas, they get the leave a country where they would have died. For the Oompa Loompas in charge, it means freedom, respect and the necessities of life for them and their families. The unskilled Oompa Loompas are duped into believing that this labor is gratitude and payment for their very lives and the lives of their families. With that artificial outlook, it’s easy to see why they would be so happy. Maybe Oompa Loompa ignorance is bliss.

I’m in the process of switching the blarg from Blosxom software to WordPress, which might involve a radical overhaul of the ancient content on the dot org. To prepare, just in case, I’m posting some older writing on the blarg, so that it can be archived here, instead of as dusty old html.

First up is my oft-reproduced Marxist analysis of the film “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” The article began life as a term paper for my Labor Studies 101 course when I was a wee little snot (I got an A). It was shortly thereafter published in the awesome zine, Lumpen. David Raffin has also published it in Vision?Nary!

Please excuse our appearance during renovations. We are still open to the public!

In “Uninsured in America,” Susan Starr Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle attempt to find out “where the bodies are buried” in our health care system where over 45 million people have no insurance. The book is a patchwork of profiles of people who got sick at times when they lacked insurance and the often devastating effects this had on their lives. The authors, who describe this phenomenon as the “death spiral,” don’t find so many bodies buried (although they do find many in jails or on the street) but they do find health problems that are allowed to become critical before state assistance will kick in and doctors actually pay attention, and emergency rooms used as primary care resulting in crippling debts.

Without getting bogged down in dry facts and figures, the authors provide a pretty good understanding of how the number of uninsured Americans hides how many Americans are functionally uninsured, covered by plans that have expensive premiums, deductibles and co-pays, that refuse to pay for the very “pre-existing conditions” that people most need health care for and slipping in and out of the patchwork system of Medicaid, charity, clinics and emergency rooms.

The book reminds me of an experience working for the health care workers union, doing community organizing among poor souls on Long Island whose medical debts were referred to collection agencies. Although the non-profit hospital where they went to the emergency room was required by law to provide a certain amount of charity care, these patients were never informed of the option to apply for the charity. Instead they were treated, charged tens of thousands of dollars that they could not possibly afford and had their lives turned into nightmares of bill collectors, bankruptcy and foreclosure. One family actually had good health insurance won through a union contract, but a bureaucratic error at the hospital resulted in the patient – not the insurance company – being billed. The insurance company and the hospital fought, refusing to admit error, and the hospital simply referred the matter to a collection agency. The rest of the people had no insurance. A surprising number of them had children with asthma who had bad attacks that required a visit to the emergency room. Just like that, the family became poor.

This patchwork system results in poor health care for all of us, I think. I hate going to the doctor with any kind of health complaint. I never get any kind of satisfying diagnosis. Usually, the doctor just guesses at a diagnosis and prescribes some kind of medication, without running any tests, and there’s no follow-up. I think the paperwork and bureaucracy is too much of a hassle. Fortunately for me, if my doctors miss something big, the care will be paid for by insurance so I won’t have to wait until I get so poor and so near-death that the state will finally pick up the bill, like the people profiled in “Uninsured in America.” Of course, why would I really want to push for tests that would confirm a medical condition, if that will only be used against me in seeking insurance in the future?

The United States has the best health care that money can buy, provided one has the money to buy it. Jill Quadagno’s “One Nation Uninsured” answers the question “Why the U.S. has no national health insurance.” It’s a brisk, engaging read that neatly summarizes how 90 years of failed reform efforts have entrenched the powerful interests that profit from the system.

The most prominent early opponents of a national health service were the doctors themselves. Their lobby, the American Medical Association, fought against “socialized medicine” out of fear that it would lead doctors to lose their sovereignty to bureaucrats basing decisions on budgetary needs rather than medical needs. Allied with southern politicians who feared that a federal health system would force racial integration of hospitals, these forces successfully kept national health care out of Roosevelt’s original Social Security legislation. They favored market solutions like Blue Cross and commercial insurance. A new business was created, resulting in a more powerful lobby.

The trade union leaders of the time, many of whom were social democratic in their outlook, reluctantly shifted their efforts at creating a social safety net to the bargaining table, winning employer-sponsored health care plans. Some unions – notably Sidney Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers – created their own networks of health care clinics, socialized medicine in miniature. Wartime government policies that encouraged fringe benefits over wage increases greatly expanded the private welfare state so that by the 1950′s, most large employers (including non-union firms that aimed to remain non-union) provided health care benefits.

Trade unions continued to push for a government solution to health care, but by the 1960′s they narrowed their focus to the proverbial “camel’s nose under the tent,” health insurance for the nation’s elderly. The Medicare program that the coalition of labor and seniors won had several unintended consequences. One was that with senior citizens covered through the program, and most working families fully covered by an employer’s plan, few voters clamored for a universal national health care system for the next few decades. Another consequence, happily, was the racial integration of most hospitals, under threat of being denied Medicare funding.

A regrettable consequence of Medicare was rampant inflation of cost of health care. Doctors and hospitals provided comprehensive care for senior citizens, ordering tests, procedures and drugs that they might not have before there was guaranteed funding, which was a boon not only to the health of senior citizens but to the corporate bottom line of the for-profit hospitals and insurance companies that joined the market for health care services. The cost of Medicare skyrocketed, until government efforts to control costs caused insurance companies to simply pass on the costs to employers in the form of higher premiums for their employees. Companies responded in turn by cutting benefits, introducing co-pays and turning to health maintenance organizations to control costs by denying care. The doctors’ worst fear, losing sovereignty over medical decisions, was realized through the insurance companies that they were responsible for creating.

This brings us to our current circle of hell, where an employer’s threat to cut benefits leaves many unions close to helpless in contract negotiations, where people with the dreaded “pre-existing condition” are denied meaningful coverage and where the existence (or non-existence) of national health care or employer-sponsored insurance goes a long way towards determining a company’s competitiveness in the global economy.

This January, I’ll be taking an elective class with Dean Robinson that will be exploring the United States’ lack of a national health service and its impact on our health, wealth and democracy. Quadagno’s “One Nation Uninsured” is the first book assigned. Others are Kawachi and Kennedy’s “Health of Nations: Why Inequality Is harmful to Your Health” and Sered and Fernandopulle’s “Uninsured in America.” For my paper, I will be taking a look at some trade union health clinics, particularly the Amalgamated’s (now UNITE HERE) and the NY Hotel Trades Council’s, which was inspired by Hillman’s example. These socialized medicine-in-miniature not only provide comprehensive health services, but they keep costs so low that employers actually offer up concessions in order to take part.

The lesson here, I think, is that while we might succeed in creating a single-payer health care system like Canada’s (particularly as health care becomes more of a crisis), inflation and price-gouging will be crippling until we take the profit out of the system and nationalize health care services to serve the interests of the people, not the corporations.