It was a depressing sight, but no more so than what we have come to expect.
But looking at it in a different light, what didn't happen on Monday was more in keeping with what Labor Day really commemorates which is not labor power unleashed, but labor in shackles.
For it should be remembered that the official Labor Day was really an example of what would come to be called astroturfing: in the wake of his violent suppression of the Pullman Strikes in 1894, President Cleveland, the corporate Democrat of his day, held out a labor holiday as a bauble to the unions in the hopes of gaining their support against the populist William Jennings Bryant.
Crucially, this was to be celebrated on Sept 1-six months away from the day which workers chose to celebrate their struggle, namely May 1.
This was because an official recognition of Mayday was off limits to Cleveland. To do so would have been seen as a dangerous concession to radicalism and radicals hated and feared by the industrial elites who bankrolled presidential campaigns-then and now.
So while September Labor Day would go into the books as a state sanctioned holiday, Mayday would go unrecognized until the 1950s. Then, in the full flowering of McCarthyite repression, President Eisenhower could transform it into an occasion not for celebration, but as an expression of contempt for workers. And so Mayday was designated, and remains on the books not as international workers day, but as Loyalty Day.
Resurrecting Mayday
But, despite all efforts to squelch it, Mayday continues to be celebrated by labor around the world as International Workers' Day officially or unofficially, with strikes, demonstrations and sabotage along with song, poetry and satire, though not in the country of its birth.
It is now time to bring Mayday back home.
The way to do it is for everyone who has a job to take a unauthorized holiday.
The time to do it is next year: on May 1, 2010.
And the place to celebrate is on Wall Street.
Why Wall Street?
Because Wall Street is a metastasizing cancer.
It was Wall Street, which created the crisis now consigning a younger generation of Americans to a future without job prospects, middle aged workers to perpetual anxiety and older workers-those who managed to escape hemorrhaging lay offs- chained to their jobs through their golden years.
And it was Wall Street which negotiated the massive theft of taxpayer dollars channelling it directly into the pockets of financial, insurance and banking institutions and executives in the form of obscene bonuses.
And it was Wall Street friendly Obama advisors Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner and who were responsible for the miserly stimulus negotiated in the full awareness that unemployment rates would spiral into the double digits-- music to the ears of Wall Street which responds to bigger pool of desperate workers with enthusiastic applause.
And it was Wall Street which successfully lobbied for Obama's disgraceful jettisoning of his campaign promise to pass EFCA- virtually guaranteeing organized labor's continuing descent into irrelevance.
And it was Wall Street which shepherded through the grotesque transformation of "health care reform" into a bailout of the insurance industry, which, having been guaranteed 40 million new subsidized customers, will continue to commit to murder by spread street, in response to Wall Street demands for ever more profits.
And it is the Wall Street centered tumor of growth at all costs that has pushed us to the brink of environmental catastrophe and which will push us over the edge.
And it is Wall Street's half century of cheerleading for insane defense budgets providing a subsidy for defense industries and which views each bombed dropped on a wedding party, each bullet fired off at an innocent grandmother, each grenade maiming a child, as one more entry on a macabre balance sheet.
Come One, Come All
Mayday 2010 should bring us all out onto Wall Street-what's left of the unions, of the peace movement, greens, civil and constitutional rights groups -all those who are finally waking up to the Wall Street reality behind the Madison Avenue image of the Obama phenomenon.
But mostly, the tens of millions who find no one speaking for them need walk off their jobs and head downtown: doctors, nurses and patients, the long and short term unemployed, the debt ridden, the bankrupt and about to be bankrupt, those foreclosed on or threatened with foreclosure, those saddled with credit card debt at loan shark rates of interest, those twenty somethings who will likely see a planet descending into a terminal environmental collapse.
Leave Washington demonstrations to the teabaggers, birthers, and assorted other conspiracy addled wingnuts.
Wall Street is where the deals are cut, and a jobless, low wage, toxic future is made reality by its Washington subsidiary.
We need to throw our bodies on the greed addled machine which is Wall Street and force it to grind to a halt.
This is the language of force and it is the only language which the gang of thieves on Wall Street understand.