Inherit the Wind: I agree with your analysis completely. It isn’t new, though. This set of tactics has been in place for as long as I can remember and I’m in my late 50’s. We aren’t always so completely and heavily engaged in wars, but often enough for this to be a nearly continuous state of affairs.

NABNYC: I will never forgive Clinton for NAFTA, just for starters. And Obama has not undone a single egregious policy that was put into effect under George W. Bush. Our rights to privacy, among others, are being literally stripped from us. And we are all hostage to the Patriot Act. Both liberals and progressives have spoken out against Obama’s continuation and amplification of these, as well as other, unconstitutional policies proceeding directly from his administration. The fact that this erosion of our rights continues and worsens really can’t be credited to progressives. And, by the way, there are precious few real progressives out there. Being a Democrat or being a liberal does not necessarily make one a progressive, just as being a Republican does not necessarily make one a Tea-Partier. 

I wanted George Bush to be impeached. My concern was that, minus some form of censure to Bush, no future president would be able to resist the powers Bush usurped to the office of the president. Power corrupts. Period. And our current president has demonstrated this all too well. Had Bush been impeached and these powers rolled back and returned to the legislative branch where they belonged, we would not be dealing with quite so many troubling government invasions into our lives, or as much festering public resentment as we are now. Moreover, it has taken a fairly long line of careless presidents, Democrat and Republican both, to wreck our economy.

If we can’t stop fighting among ourselves - and this is the real victory of our government in its war on its own citizens, we all will lose. United we stand. Divided we fall. We’re fighting over the jar of peppermint sticks while our government walks away with the store. If you extend this analogy a bit - and it does hold up - you can look at the entire globe and see that the people in power are the ultimate beneficiaries of infighting among the citizenry. “Keep them busy over malarky and they’ll never notice the real mischief we’re up to.”

The human race, our species, has far too many troubling challenges right now for us to waste so much time squabbling among ourselves rather than rolling up our sleeves, pitching in, and doing our best to help each other along. And none of us has to go to the ends of the earth (wherever that may be, based on where one actually is) to do this. Most of us do have neighbors, do live in communities. Our communities are not trouble free. It’s not too hard to do one small kindness, one right thing, each day. Sometimes that may be as simple as a smile. Like gravity on earth, the ripple effect is always present.

The truth is that the labor movement became corrupt decades ago—not in the sense of mafia influence, but in the sense of privileged trade-union white men with good wages and benefits did not want to work to help women and non-whites get the same.  So instead of organizing the excluded groups, they just sat back and waited to retire, and certainly gave up any claim to be in a leadership position. 

Liberals and progressives are also responsible because of their lack of principle.  We should have called out Clinton, Rubin and Rahm Emanuel back in the 1990s because they are the ones who are most responsible for what has happened.  Why didn’t Democrats get rid of that Wall Street lackey Alan Greenspan instead of using him to advance their own personal political agendas to get lots of money then retire as an agent of Wall Street.  Without Nafta, without the deregulation of finance, none of thise would have happened.  To this day the Democrats refuse to call out their own members who have betrayed the people of this country and who are directly responsible for our suffering.

Today Obama announced he is continuing to follow the dictates of Wall Street by agreeing to ask Congress to pass a law to allow Mexican truckers to pass our borders as a regular part of commerce, and to eliminate the American trucking industry.  This means American truckers will be forced to complete with third world workers, and we know who will win that one.  Not the public, because our roads will be trashed, and the truckers will be driving 18 hours on meth to try to earn a living at the new reduced wages.

The teamsters will be destroyed as will the Longshoremen, because everything will begin to be shipped into Mexico then trucked up here.  Bye-bye more unions.

Of course Mexico is the most flagrant violator of sending millions of people across our borders without permission to take American jobs, and the biggest importer of drugs, both of which will be radically increased by these new laws.

Leveling.  That’s the word they used years ago.  They (the WTO, the IMF, World Bank—the agents of Wall Street) wanted to “level” American workers, crush them down to the same level as poor people everywhere, so nobody can stand up to the international predatory reign of capital. 

It’s very hard to see the Democrats as being anything other than Wall Street agents.  People get all excited about the Republicans because they are more blatantly racist and sexist, more publicly ignorant, but when it comes to policies I see no significant difference between the two parties.  Neither will help the people of this country.

I must admit it is now time to recognize that 99% of the Republican leadership and a significant part of the Democratic leadership is interested in creating a permanent underclass, that is always impoverished, always living JUST on the edge and this is for two obvious reasons:
1) People on the edge of economic catastrophe will do any job for any pay under any conditions just to survive.  They’ll accept coolie wages and working conditions, thus reducing corporate cost.
2) The Military becomes a VERY attractive option for young people in that underclass because it promises a solid income to support their families, thus providing a continuing flow of cannon fodder that won’t protest in the streets about serving in unjust wars.

In other words: Cheap labor and cannon fodder.

Lafayette, thanks for the scenario, the new world order seems so beneficially positive, to the owners and corporate interests who are people now. Also a temporary perk,  I suppose to the replacement workers for a time? Maybe in a hundred years or so,  American workers may get some jobs back after they sink below what is now the average income in India?

As for the EU being like states, makes me view Romania as the EU’s Texas.

I will never be able to comprehend, how some people can be so compassionate for the bottom line?...... Guess that is capitalism! One snag I see it the rising price of fuel could change things?

As the world turns, this may be news to the workers of the world, especially when it becomes their time to be in the barrel!  It is well known employees or the workers of the world are nothing more than inventory numbers on a ledger. After observing the Qaddafis or the Walkers of this world, it all makes sense!

After the dust settles in the Middle East, the Middle east may become the new Romania?

Me rose colored glasses need to be traded in for those more realistic kaleidescope ones.

You know Tao Walkers basic premise makes so much more sense now! (I have always found his basic message on the money, just more so now)! But luckily I happen to live in the boonies, so I may more easily follow the local way.

In fact I will do something about it today!

TRUE STORY

IC: After the 3rd day of the strike, the company closed the factory permanently and left town.

In France, company management of a closing plant are more subtle.

True story: An American company owns a small manufacturing plant that makes components for bicycles. It decided to close the plant. But, the law here in France obliges them to either indemnify the worker or propose another job elsewhere.

So the company proposed that the workers go to Romania, where it was expanding an existing plant - and work there for one-third the wage earned in France.

Of course, nobody accepted the offer. They negotiated the indemnification - meaning they occupied the plant (not allowing management to dismantle the machinery and send it to Romania) before the company agreed on a “ransom” indemnification (which amounts to almost a year’s salary here).

It worked ... the workers however are facing long-term unemployment because there is no alternative in the remote place in which the plant was located.

MY POINT

In France, the most popular selling car is made by the subsidiary of France’s principle car manufacturer. It dislocated work that would have been done in Western Europe to Eastern Europe. Other companies are doing the same in those production lines where higher-cost labor is a key competitive factor.

When this is done, manufacturing may have to go, but at least other departments might remain thus at least saving those jobs.

This dislocation of production to Romania had four consequences:
1) Romania is part of the EU, so, like any American state, one can set up shop there. What is happening is very much like the textile and plastics industries that first moved south and created jobs there - before going on to Mexico and finally to the Far East. This progression is, unfortunately, ineluctable.
2) Romanians, with their new-found higher paying jobs are importing more for their counterparts in Europe. They are also seen vacationing in the sunny south of the EU. So, the money from manufacturing in Old Europe comes back as Tourism or exports from the New Europe. It’s not quite a wash, but it is better than nothing.
3) Those in Old Europe who have lost their jobs are consigned to Service Industry jobs at much lower incomes. This is unfortunate, since many of them are skilled personnel. But, there is not much that a government can do except to retrain them for other jobs. Because of the diversity of languages, Europe does not have the labor-mobility that has the US.
4) Any notion about forbidding jobs to be exported just wont work. It will trigger a Trade War that will mean even worse conditions than exist today.

Who have the so-called republicans not demonized to radicalize those voters that respond favorably to the demonization of our fellow working Americans?

Let us hang together or we will surely hang separately.

The traditional Republican party is dead, slain, not by the Democrats, but by those who called themselves Conservatives. They were not Conservatives, they are Fascists-Totalitarian, corrupt, and incompetent that are only want power, total power over the people.

Their ideology, starting with Reagan, Bush Sr., and continuing on with the Great Puppet-bush jr. has been very destructive to America. It is they who have been the “Big Spenders” of taxpayer and borrowed dollars. Reagan increased the National Debt 186%, Bush Sr. 68%, and bush jr. almost 100%. All that spending lined the pockets of their cronies for a total of 20 years.

Some still refer to these “Things” as politicial, they are not political, they are criminal in every sense of the word.

They along with their criminal cronies in the corporate world have reduced America to a third world status. They will not accept responsibility for their actions and propagate Nazi propaganda 24/7 to blame someone else, Democrat or not. Their recklessness and criminality created the world’s biggest fraud ever and brought about the almost collapse of the financial markets. That almost financial collapse has cost America over 25% of it’s total wealth that will take 40 years to recover if they manage everything right. They, with their narrow minded ideology have no intention of doing things right.

The total cost of the bailout is not $700,000,000,000 but over $15,000,000,000,000 with all the guarantees and the Federal Reserve buying those junk bonds that were worth pennies on the dollar. Those bonds were not purchased at “mark to market” but the asking price of those financial institutions that created the junk in the first place.

Why did those that benefit the most from our free and Democratic society so so much damage to it?

Do not hold your breath waiting for an apology or a change in attitude.

Once “individual”-ized, once the made-up “self” has displaced in their consciousness the Natural Person us Human Beings by-nature are, once the manufactured “nuclear family” has been isolated completely from the Organic Community that is Humanity’s Natural Organic Form, the “huddled masses” of domesticated people, gathered into nation-states (then divided against each other into factions based in such make-believe CONceits as religion, class, party, etc.) are real easy pickings for the predators in their midst.  Labor unions are just one among many kinds of random collections of these hapless “individuals,” and as such are ultimately nothing but doomed-to-fail stop-gaps in the industrial-strength process of turning people into just another use-it-up-and-throw-it-away commodity….subject to all the legalized ruthless exploitation (for fun and profit) presently inflicted on many among All Our Relations.

There is no place in our Mother Earth’s Living Arrangement for the eco-cancer-causing rogue particle “individual,” the toxic half-lived radio-activated ‘product’ of the unavoidable decay of the “nuclear family”....unavoidable because of the damned thing being cut-off from the Living Roots of Humanity, and thus from the wellsprings of the Living Virtue of Organic Integrity without which no Kind can survive.  Our tame Sisters’ and Brothers’ rapidly worsening predicament is entirely biological.  There is absolutely no ideological/institutional/technical remedy for any part of it.

This eCONomy so many are so foolishly hoping to “revive” has never been really alive anyhow.  It is nothing but the ‘operating system’ for the “civilization” disease process now in its terminal stages.  No amount of “money,” no “job security,” no guns, no ‘god’, no “power” anywhere will make truly viable the solitary and solipsistic members of a sick sub-species that has been used to wage all-out war against the rest of Her Living Arrangement.

This is THE END of the world as you’ve known it, tame Sisters and Brothers.  Those among you unable to grow-up in time to be more help than hindrance in Earth’s Purification Ceremony will be excused from further participation in the Song ‘n’ Dance of Life Herownself here….at-least until we have recovered sufficiently let some of you back in for another try. 

It might be a pretty long wait, though.

HokaHey!

Kerryrose:  Might be more fun to answer the question of why people DON’T turn on each other and then try to establish conditions that more closely support that answer.
  Of course “competition” would have to be ditched in favor of “cooperation.”  “Despair” would have to be discredited in favor of “hope.”  “Care-more” institutions would have to replace “care-less” institutions. “Truth-telling” would begin to prevent “lying.” Little by little, now and then, here and there.  Call if “moral evolution” or simply “shared intelligence”—the nonviolent evolution of common sense.

The interesting question to me is why middle class private workers who are struggling fall for the ‘union freeloaders’ tactic?

Why don’t they understand that they are being led to hate someone who is not their enemy?

It seems to me that if the basic question of why people will turn on each other is not answered there will be no way toward the future.

There is undoubtedly corruption in unions. If any organization in this country can be corrupted, it will be. But getting rid of unions as a corrective measure is throwing out the baby along with the bathwater.

Letting remaining unions be dismantled, or depriving any unionized group of the right to engage in collective bargaining, is an act of hostility toward all American workers, regardless of which sector they work in. The right to unionize in the US was very hard won. Giving it up - or taking it away - now on the excuse that the state of the economy requires it, is akin to robbery in my book.

I had my first “real” job in 1970 or 1971. A clothing factory in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Safety conditions in this factory were terrible. Workers were treated like school children, with purses inspected as we left at the end of the day and a doctor’s note required for any absence from illness. The pay was around $1.60 per hour. It was minimum wage at the time.

I quit this job after my third month, but a friend I had made there kept me up to date. Eventually union reps arrived and started talking to employees who then went on strike to protest not being allowed to join the union. You cannot imagine what an act of courage this was for most of the women employed there. After the 3rd day of the strike, the company closed the factory permanently and left town.

I’m pro union. Period. If you want to go back to the days of no minimum wage, no restriction on how many hours a day or a week you can be made to work, no time and a half for overtime, no mandate for on the job safety, no protections at all for working class people, then maybe it’s no skin off your back if the Republicans accomplish what they are hell bent on accomplishing. Even Dr Seuss’s Yertle the Turtle knows better though.

The system we have had for most of my lifetime is inadequate. Minimum wage, which has risen so slowly as to be almost unnoticeable, has never been a living wage. But it has always been better than the alternative, which would be whatever an employer thinks he can get away with. This inadequate system can quickly get much worse. If the Republican leadership gets what it wants, things will get much worse, worse for many more people, and minus even the pitiful safety nets we still have. Moreover, none of these losses will be easily regained, no matter how much the economy improves. The Republicans are playing for keeps.

RIGHTS AND WRONGS

NAB: I would like to see workers rights reflected in laws, including particularly equal opportunity and pay for women

Well put.

Worker rights in many modern democracies are coded in law. In general, they are more advanced than ours. For instance, in France, the right to strike is part of the country’s constitution.

The US has yet to ratify formally the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Read Article 23 of that Declaration here and you will understand why, perhaps, it has never been ratified in the US - even though it was signed by the US representative at it’s passage in the late 1940s.

When one reads entirely the aforementioned document, one can understand how delayed we are as regards Human Rights ... despite the fact that we have a Bill of Rights. Curious, no?

Lafayette and the progressive plan is our ally in the struggle- Our image based corporate bought mass media needs to be flanked by a grass roots exposure of the problem.  We’re on the way with Inside Job making best documentary at the Oscars.  We’re on our way with Wisconsin and Ohio stepping up the dialogue.  Remember, this is what they fear the most-they fear; their brand being permanently recognized as the party of the plutocrat and not the party of so called “moral superiority”. We’re on our way to educating the public- this is the key, the web is making it possible to circumvent the tube, this is why they fear it and want to put a padlock on connectivity.  Why is the U.S. still at or below 2.0 Mbps?

I would like to see workers rights reflected in laws, including particularly equal opportunity and pay for women.  I would also like to see the unions commit to capping the total compensation paid to their insiders at some multiple of their lowest-paid member’s salary.  A union representing people being paid $6.00/hour should not be paying its insiders hundreds of thousands of dollars.  It’s obscene, and it’s one of the biggest problems with unions today.  Their leaders are corrupt fat-cats who do not get out and organize, instead sitting on their investments watching union jobs leave the country and waiting until they can retire.  Useless gobshites.

I don’t know what the Wisconson proposal is, but assume we’ll soon see it in many other states.  It would be nice to see workers get active and get angry to fight for all working people.  But I’ll tell you the truth:  as a woman, somebody has stolen 20% of my wages from every single paycheck my entire working life.  You know what that adds up to over a long career?  Retirement IRAs inadequately funded, cheaper cars, less medical and dental care, few vacations, and the inability to ever retire.  Yet in all the years that I’ve been working for a living I have never seen the other workers get out and demonstrate, shut down the states, to demand that this society stop brutalizing the women workers. 

So I support the workers 100%.  But I just wish they would have done the same for me and for other women workers sometime during the decades that I have spent toiling with less opportunity and 20% less in my paycheck.

“I can hire half the working class to kill the other half.”  I have not heard this quote for some time, but fits the mold very well. 

In my nativity I can not even begin to comprehend this kind of thinking, it seems I cannot understand any reason behind the criminal mind either.

Omar Qaddafi and Walker the governor of Wisconsin have a lot in common, they both believe they can hire the people to kill the other half of the people because half the people love them so much?

Workers’ right to organize and protest against corporations is a democratic necessity analogous to citizens’ right to protest against and even dismantle government. This principle should hold regardless of which sector workers belong to.

Capitalism needs to be de-coupled from democracy, the unholy union having been created by the Protestant Puritanical founders. That mutant is now harming the nation, by suspending any kind of regulatory control on greedy trade.

It’s somewhat ironic that when the Marshall Plan was implemented in Germany, it was mandated that labor participate in the decision making process at the highest level. Why did we insist on this requirement? We obviously had a premonition that without a check to corporate power, fascism would find a way to dominate once again.

Granted, Germany had a robust guild orientated social sector that had successfully protected it’s knowledge base. As it played out, this was pivotal in maintaining quality controls. Today they remain a very influential part of Germany’s industrial leadeership structure. Their quality goods are envied world wide.

Back here in the USA anything like a participatory labor element present on corporate board is scoffed into oblivion wherein an average worker makes 1/500th the top executive.

Greed starts at the top. No matter how you cut it, typify it, mischaracterize it, shit rolls down hill.

A CONTRARIAN VIEW FOR THE PROGRESSIVE AGENDA

RR: But, seizing the circumstances of hard times, the Republicans are promoting and provoking intramural class warfare. They are pitting what is left of the private sector middle class against the public sector middle class. It is a brilliant tactic

With the economic recovery in the making, this argument will dissipate like the morning dew. Besides the deficit-solution is obvious – we increase taxes on that part of household incomes that affect least Disposable Income (which sparks the propensity to spend and thus Consumer Demand and economic growth that creates jobs).

Meaning all household incomes above $150K and hardest on those above $250K.

And we can get back to a Progressive Agenda; that is, Public Service jobs must expand, the only question being when and how.

When: First, the economy must be tracking its long-term growth rate (3 to 4%) - meaning maybe this year, maybe next year.
How: By expanding Public Services that are overseen by the state or Federal government but subcontracted to and provided by the private sector.

Some examples:
•  A Public Health Care Service (functioning at Civil Service wages much lower than market rates) in the same manner as the Military Services.
•  Home Care for the Aged that allows them to remain at home but attended to by trained care takers.
•  City Caretaking Services contracted to private enterprise under performance-contracts. (Monuments, park, road and waterway network, building, etc. attendants)
•  City Social Services contracted to private enterprise under performance-contracts:
o   Substance and alcoholic abuse
o   Psychological care for dysfunctional families
o   Shelter and nourishment for the destitute
•  Educational services such as tutoring (for failing children), or psychological care for parent-child relational dysfunction.
•  Mandating that the city provide “entry-level” housing (contracted to private enterprise) at low-cost, where rental fees can be employed to pay mortgages that ultimately pass the property into private ownership. The funds could come from a Federal Mortgage Agency (like the ex-Fannie & Freddie) for such purposes.
•  Etc., etc., etc.

MY POINT: A viable alternative

The above is based upon the notion of classic Keynesian Stimulus expansion, which provides state and Federal agencies with the wherewithal to spend. (The deficit will correct itself.)

Which is the exact opposite of what the Rabid Right is proposing, and the Looney Left is in such a dither that it proposes no viable alternative.

Where there is a will, there’s a way.