Saturday, September 10, 2011

The Decline of Unions and What It Means for Us All.

Why is it that unions are so depleted? Because the Right has been running a vendeta against them for decades. It is so easy - and ignorant, I might add - to characterize unionists as "thugs." It is a stereotype that holds very little water; especially in this day and age. Jimmy Hoffa IS dead and "On the Waterfront" is a 57 year old movie. It is unions that fought to make work environments safe. It is unions that fought for a 40 hour work week and the 8 hour work day. The list goes on. Without their efforts, 6 and 7 day work weeks, 16 hour work days, workhouses and sweatshops would likely still exist in profusion here in America.


And what was the terrible crime that workers commited? They wanted to get a little ahead of the game. They wanted to live a little better than their parents. They wanted to leave a better world for their kids. Those filthy bastards!


The dwindling of the middle class goes along virtually step for step with the dwindling of unions. America's middle class is steadily being decimated and replaced with a widening gap between the poor and the very rich. Our society is well on its way to mirroring one more like that of India.


India is an almost purely capitalist society with very little government regulation or involvement with so called "entitlements." Everyone is pretty much on their own there. Is that the "ideal" that you right wingers aspire to? Do you not understand that unless you ARE very rich, that you and yours will likely end up on the same garbage heap right along with the rest of the great American unwashed who you hold in such disdain?


It is the middle class Right who are the dupes. It is the middle class Right who are the ones falling in line like obedient prep school children, standing in that line, keeping it straight, praying they don't piss themselves, while they march in lock step to the commands of the rich and the corporate mogels who are playing that marching tune on a continuously looped eight track tape.


The very rich have effectively blinded the middle class Right into believing that they give a crap about them. They reassuringly feed them bullshit about being good christians and standing on their own two feet just as our forefathers intended, as they deftly pull the rug out from under them while puffing on a $300 cigar and sipping 200 year old brandy.


No, the Koch Brothers and their like are not "thugs" in the usual sense of the word. Yet, what they are doing amounts to violence beyond what the worst union bosses could have ever imagined.


It is in their mindset that there is no such thing as being too rich. Wealth is all that matters. If you have a million, then you must have two. If you have ten billion, then you must go after another ten. They dazzle us all with the blinding light of promised riches,  and far too many of us lay back with visions of owning rooms full of diamond studded 200 inch LCD TVs ensconsed in multiple McMansions scatterd about the world, and having solid gold condums with which, we too, can fuck the poor with our wealth without having to actually touch them. (That would be icky.)


It is neither unions nor socialism that will mark the downfall of this country. Rather, it will be the selfishness, the greed and the self righteous condescension of the Right and the contemptible religious moralists that will cause this nation to collapse into the fetid offal of obscene consumerism and sanctimonious bullshit.














Read more: http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/angry-liberals/#comments#ixzz1XWYDHUZI