Editor:
The Right says Obama doesn’t love America…
I say nobody hates America and Americans more than the Republicans, Libertarians and Tea Party along with “America’s” corporations whom the aforementioned represent.
While corporate profits keep setting new record highs, the parties of the Right, of the 1 percent, keep smacking down, in their eyes, the undeserving American worker. If they’re organized, bust em up. If not, bust em down.
I’m sure CEOs around the globe are fervently trying to solve the employees/customer conundrum – how to eliminate the former while retaining the latter. How to milk the cow without having to feed it.
You know they feel they deserve it all and you know they have also, in their cunning way, convinced a whole lot of Americans into feeling that they do.
Same as they have turned non-union workers against union workers. Divide and conquer. Of course, it helps when you own all the media. You have to give the Right their due when it comes to having their act together lie-wise. They, as a block, speak with a forked tongue.
John Boehner, when told the Republican spending cuts would kill over a million jobs, shot back with “so be it!” They condemned President Obama for proposing to extend mandatory overtime pay to more workers.
When I see Boehner and McConnell, I see the plantation owners of the Dixie South where they love liberty and hate equality. Repression. Suppression. Oppression.
They aim to gut the power of, if not eventually eliminate, 7.2 million organized government workers, such as teachers, the clerks at the DMV, social workers, public hospital employees, meat/poultry inspectors, road workers, property tax auditors and civil servants in general – all the employees of the bureaucracies that the Right hates so much.
Once privatized, all power over wages/benefits/working conditions will be in the exclusive hands of the owners.
If you want to milk the cow, you have to feed it. Henry Ford understood that.
If you expect Americans to fuel your consumption-driven “Go Shopping!” neoliberal economy and live without Social Security, Medicare and other social programs, you will have to pay a wage that makes saving at the very least a million dollars by retirement.
Replacing public-sector workers with free prison labor has become a trend in Republican-led states. I can see using them to replace illegal immigrant labor, but union workers are being replaced with prison labor under Gov. Scott Walker’s collective bargaining law.
Prison labor should never be used to replace honest, law-abiding American workers. But, you see, Scott Walker (bankrolled by Koch, by the way) and his party hate unions, hate for Americans to be paid a living wage.
Georgia is replacing firefighters with prisoners to save money. Where are these honest, law-abiding workers and their families to go? On welfare?
In 2011, Tennier Industries, learned that it had lost a $45 million contract to produce clothing for the Department of Defense (DOD) to Federal Prison Industries, better known as UNICOR – which operates industry programs for the Bureau of Prisons. Prisoners employed with UNICOR earn from $.23 to $1.15 per hour, making it impossible for outside businesses to compete.
Tennier had to lay off around 100 law-abiding American workers after losing the DOD contract!
Who brought you all this prison baloney (and all the anti-labor legislation)? ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council). an organization of conservative state legislators and private-sector representatives (think Koch, BP oil, R.J. Reynolds) who crafts corporate-friendly state-level legislation.
Remember: In 2012 during a congressional hearing on a Republican proposal to cut nearly $17 billion from scheduled infrastructure projects, our Peter Defazio had a question for the Republicans on the committee: “Why do you hate the country so much?”
“I meant what I said,” Defazio said later. “Why do they hate the country so much that they don’t want to make those needed investments to put millions of people to work? It’s just that they hate Obama so much they want the economy to fail. That’s all I can figure out. Either that or they’re just nuts. One or the other – and I said both those things. And I stand by it.”
Peter Defazio for president!
George Carlin said: “You know what they want? They want obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly low-wage jobs with the shorter hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.
“And now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later, because they own this place! It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club.”
George Carlin, (RIP)
Diane Daiute
Sweet Home