Thursday, April 3, 2014

Union Sundown: The Decline of the American Economy And The Rise of the Bureaucratic Nightmare

Anthony Freda Art
Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post

Thirty years ago, Bob Dylan wrote a song called “Union Sundown” that now seems as if it was nothing less than prophecy set to music. The song, which attracted a great deal of hatred from establishment critics at the time, spoke out against the neo-liberal/free trade ideology that was beginning to take hold in the United States. It also took aim at the obsession of turning everything into a commodity the practice of seeking profits above all else.

In 1983, the true effects of globalism and free trade were only beginning to manifest themselves to the general public in ways that could no longer be denied. Already, in the 1980s, American jobs were beginning to move offshore and American workers left to pick through the growing piles of rubble that was once the economic envy of the world. Union busting, the low-wage economy, and growing unemployment was only then beginning to become the order of the day in the general purview of the American people.