The Writers' Strike & Upton Sinclair

What has Upton Sinclair to do with the Writers' strike. A lot. The strike is going into its 65 day. It is a strike and has given a shot in the arm to an anemic trade union movement in the US, a movement much weakened by outsourcing of manufacturing and of critical jobs outside the country. The big 6 -- Song, Viacom, CBS, Disney, General Electric, and TimeWarner--are playing hardball to deny intellectual workers in television and Hollywood the just fruits of work of theirs as the industry expands on to the internet, say. So when we strip everything down to its bare bones, we have a classical setting of the big rich bosses against the workers. Now here's where Upton Sinclair comes in. The very much touted and dull film 'There will be blood', loosely based on Sinclair's 'Oil' is a pastiche of the real meat of the long forgotten novel. It has at its core a confrontation of a rapacious oil baron and a strike among oil workers. It is crushed brutally, but Hollywood has eviscerated the body of the story with an ugly portrait of an oil man played by Daniel Day Lewis who crushes an evangelical preacher with a passion for money and his own self promotion.
The Writers' strike won't be crushed in this instant, but the big 6 are doing everything to weaken further a labour union. They're willing to loose hundreds of millions to hold the upper hand. And so the Golden Globe awards are now a press conference, and let's hope the concrete long hours of the Oscars will go down in the dust. For very few actors will cross the picket line, and the big 6 are willing to walk away with a small blip on the very black bottom line of theirs. Little wonder no one in the years following the stunted reign of saint Ronald Reagan thinks much of labour unions or the need to combine the strength of the many into a fist to punch the greedy owners in the nose for a just and equitable standard of living, in an age of rampant individualism and outright greed. Let everyone see 'Let the cradle rock' about workers ... let's see more about the working man. On the radio and television we get the bosses propaganda on business and the like. No one talks of labour and the worker. It's about time. And though many may not think that a strikers win, let them look at the writers!