﻿Remote Control Doesn’t Bring Home the Bacon 
By T-BONE SLIM

When starvation comes through the door, principles fly out the window; and man winks back at the enticing sandwich. Starvation does not come through the door voluntarily; it is chased in by parasites—and when (principles “shoot the chutes” the parasites grab them. Your principles is what they are after.
They wish to degrade you and me. It’s a regular business of degradation and they are professionals. That’s why the world is so badly off —a soap factory stinks.
My principles? They can’t get ‘em. I’ve got ‘em anchored in the I.W.W. and, as General Grant remarked, “the war’s going to go on just like this until the cows come home and the soap factory has lost its odor. And I don’t mean mebbe,” he added cautiously — and so it was.
Problems, struggles, and cares is pretty much all that a worker gets out of the capitalist system. Frustrations on every hand engineered by capitalists, and progress is almost a superhuman task while they rule the roost. Thieves they are, and recent income skullduggeries go far to prove they would as soon rob the government as their greatest competitor or smallest countryman.
If they will rob their country they will rob me and you, and there’s no two ways about it.
You would not expect a thief to change his ways just because he is dealing with the government. Once a thief, always a thief. Our employers are thieves and the mere fact that they send their corporation lawyers to Washington to make the loopholes, doesn’t alter the degree of knavery; they are thieves either in the first place or the second.
My father used to say: “Never steal a thing outright, move it once or twice; it’ll be easier on your conscience.” Wise hombre! May he rest in peace. He has saved my conscience almost intact.
The Civil War thieves are still alive and doing business at the old stand. Quick, government, double the guard over the gold vault in Kentucky.
They say that good government sleeps beneath the weaping willows in Arlington. This is not so however. The fog has lifted on the Potomac. Minimum pay bill gone through; 40 hour week and 40 cents per, which equals $16 a week, should not be construed as an ultimate gem of our generous law constructors. To the contrary, that insignificant figure gives us the low-down to which our legitimate employers have fallen—congress had to step in and draw a line in the sands of time beyond which the falling tides must not recede— how humorous and yet how ironical!

Frenzy to histeria:
When the corporation lawyers went down to Washington and devised the loopholes, the loopholes applied also to the smaller employers, up and down and all around. A hole for one was a hole for all. A lot of social pillars krept through—like bums crawling under a pay-toilet gate. And we’re supposed to honor and respect them.
They have been in the business so long that they believe themselves honest. It’s got into their blood. It’s second nature with them, and you can’t arbitrate it out of their systems. The only argument they recognize is power, and power spells One Big Union.
They’ll agree with you. But just the same I’d advise you—back away from them and keep both your eyes right on them. They might shoot you through the back—and that is a disgrace first and an outrage afterwards.

When the dishwasher an automobile worker? When he works in an automobile factory cafeteria. It is then hat the noble pearldiver (as an industrial unionist) is able to take over and run the industry, alongwith his fellow workers, when capitalism has ceased, or the hog has fondered itself. It is then that they can carry on production without interruption, and do it better, without the hindrance of economic royalists or starvation wages. But they can do it only as a one big union—in any industry.
That is what you call “intimate control.”
John L. Lewis and Willie Green are trying to do it by “remote control.” Ever try remote picketing? It’s like picking grapes in a coal mine. No. You’ve got to get near the cherries or there is no strawberry short cake . . . And you can do all this without the aid of union leaders or politicians.
“Oh, my God,” screams the politician, “you’ve got to have political action along with industrial action.” Aren’t they generous! They’ll now let us have industrial action if you’ll let them have political action. (They want to get into swing positions so they can show the boss, their old enemy, some favors.)
Don’t be gullible.
The trouble is just this:
Political actionists have done so little work in their days that they have no industrial union to go to and must have political pie to subsist on when capitalism shall have passed away. In other words, they never intend to work.
In an industrial union they never could run things and might be thrown out on their ear, so you can hardly blame them for wishing to try remote control.
