"rebuttal-hillson"

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The remarks of candidates Carlson and Marty on the question of "values" is symptomatic of the banality of their campaigns, and how far removed both of these professional politicians are from the real lives of workers, farmers and others for whom this election is just another day of platitudes, buzz words and sound bites signifying more of the same.

Senator Marty lectures us about the "decline in our sense of civic values," and offers that the most important "source" for these lost notions is "families," along with "churches and synagogues, schools and the business community." Really.

Real, lasting "values" flow from shared experience of struggle, collective action, learning of one's capacity to think, act, and do things that change lives, countries, and worlds. Marty omits reference to anything having to do with social change.  He should link arms in front of an abortion clinic and face off rightwing bigots; go on strike, like I and 1,100 other Soo Line Railroad workers did, against a giant corporation with $13 billion in assets; protest for years in the streets against a war, a racist state institution like Jim Crow, fight for suffrage, march against nuclear power, organize a trade union. For John Marty, such battles, then and now, don't deserve a mention at all, a point he shares with his arch-rival, the incumbent governor.

But struggles like these forge class loyalty, class pride, a sense of human worth and dignity that can't be preached from a book, taught in a class room, or most certainly acquired from the practices of "the business community"--profiteers, usurers, charlatans, legal thieves, some of whom drape themselves in charitable causes to effect the image of lamb, which less than ever conceals the wolf.  "Hate crimes and violence" which Marty deplores, are natural and inevitable products of dog-eat-dog competition, greed, individual accumulation, and other key ingredients of the private profit system, which Marty, like Carlson, defend.  

Carlson, like Marty, pontificates, but his platform is not one of trite homilies about hearth, pulpit and profit, but busting knuckles and caning delinquents. For Carlson, slashing workers compensation is a "reform," not a crime against labor that is already degraded by low pay and endangered by increasingly unsafe working conditions. It's not a "crime" that 140,000 Minnesotans work a minimum wage of $4.25, below the poverty level. It's not a crime that millionaire hucksters from Northwest Airlines fleece working people for millions for a scam expansion that will never happen.  Let some worker hustle a little deal and there's the IRS and the cops, lawyers, mandatory sentencing. But if a boss busts a union and tosses workers into the streets, like at CFI (members of John Marty's value-enriching "business community?"), why that's just limbering up for competition in the market place.  Struggle determines values; solidarity in, with and through struggle strengthens them, builds!
  the kind of self confidence work

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