Governor Walker, Candidate Romney and those who speak loudest for him are down on labor, down on their unions and union leaders. They are, in effect, down on the working man's right to band together and, to coin an expression, petition their bosses for a redress of their grievances. Some of them would have you think that unions are out to destroy America. Or that they have already destroyed an America that was. I think this:
The union leader, just like you and me -- and just like your boss and mine -- every corporate leader and all those who work for him, unionized or not -- are all human beings, born with the same capacities for good and for evil and for everything in between.
We humans are all born with a capacity for lust and greed, the desire for power and the capacity for its misuse in pursuit of our own interests. We are also born with the ability to ignore, discard or transcend those natural impulses and go along, as Lincoln put it, with the angels of our better nature.
We have seen labor and business leaders alike -- heads of some of our largest unions and the Chairmen and CEOS of some of our biggest banks and corporations, and a number of our most important political figures attain enormous power, and misuse it to the detriment of our society generally, and hundreds of thousands specifically and severely. Union leaders and corporate executives, even members of the clergy, humans all, are fully and equally capable of misusing power the same way -- and the evidence that some do (not all) is in front of us every day. I will leave it to you to judge which of them has the capacity to do the most damage.
If we have the guts to look at ourselves in the mirror and see ourselves honestly, and in the context of our common humanity, perhaps we can deal with human failure individually when we find it and stop demonizing by class, race, sex, politics, religion, and status. To put it in today's vernacular, and stop reading here if you guess the language could offend you, I'm fucking fed up with it!
of that 99% I'd say maybe 50 to 60% are doing alright....
they believe that the DEMs are really to blame for everything wrong in the USA
they seriously believe the recent meltdown recession was the Dems fault
and the Dems...just dont fight back...
many listen to limbaugh...think every word he says is gospel...
talk radio and TV is full of these extreme right-wingers
so in effect liberal media in the US is actually extreme right...
Leave the new age to the Chinese and their soon to be megabillionaires. If it gets bad enough we can have a regime change.
Nope. Pretty sure they are just down on unions completely ravaging the budgets of most states in the US, getting bloated, and voting themselves salaries and benefits that are far and away higher than those of the private sector.
Without unions, industry becomes the perfect fear-driven system: people dependent on a job for the bread on their table cannot risk complaining about how little bread they can afford. Unions are the only way to give individual workers sufficient collective power to obtain a measure of security and comfort in their lives.
Unions aren't perfect, but big business isn't perfect either, and if we are going to have a society that is driven by greed it is contingent upon us to make sure that workers have the capacity to be as greedy as the people who employ them. If they don't, they are no better than slaves.
The overwhelming majority of employers prior to unions raised and lowered pay at whim as well as work hours. No healthcare and no retirement.
Any fool who imagines that this has changed needs merely look at the makiladora plants across the border. No need to worry about employees. Worry about stockholders only. Employees are not really human, Stockholders are truly human.
I truly believe that the Koch brothers and others of the 1% are determined to drag everyone back to a Dickensian dystopia.
When we find good people in management AND labor, we should support them.
The issue TODAY with public sector unions is that they first, have benefited from uncommon job security by the nature of who they work for and second, have been able to push their COLLECTIVE earings average WAY ABOVE the private sector so now, there is an adjustment being made....across the country, but in particular in Wisconsin.
Many people are fed up, a majority of those voting in Wisconsin.
BTW the recall election results could also reflect the wish to go with the flow rather than elect someone they already rejected. Perhaps a better challenger would have produced a different result.
Blame the challenger.......Blame the out of state money......Blame the people. Results are the same.....TWICE.