HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE


WORKER SOLIDARITY

Merle Haggard recorded a song called "The Workin' Man Can't Get Nowhere Today," and that's truer now than when Hag recorded it. With right wing dominance in the political and corporate culture there has been an assault on working people since Ronald Reagan strode into the White House in 1981. While the rich and their lackeys have done very well, wages and benefits for working people have stagnated or actually declined. Now, after the corrupt and incompetent administration of George W. Bush, we see the bitter fruits of right wing policies in their full hideous display.

Martin Luther King was killed 41 years ago. Martin Luther King was in Memphis, Tennessee, to lend support to striking sanitation workers. We can acknowledge and support Doctor King's legacy by standing up for working people once again. This commentary by Robyn E. Blumner is at www.commondreams.org:

One of the great labor speeches in American history is King's 1961 address to the AFL-CIO. In it King reflected on the grand work of the labor movement. He said that in response to the "organized misery" of sweatshops and the notion that capital may "act without restraints and without conscience," the worker unionized and by doing so had "constructed the means by which a fairer sharing of the fruits of his toil had to be given to him."

How sad that in the intervening years King's message to workers has been lost. Worker solidarity has given way to an every-man-for-himself ethic that has helped to strip labor of the influence it once had.

No surprise then that America's prosperity over the last 30 years has not been shared with the workers who created it, with essentially all of its rewards flowing to those at the top. Workers are no longer at the table when the pie gets divided, so they get the crumbs.

It seems the American worker has just been waiting around for, as King put it, "charitable impulses to grow in his employer."

Well, they haven't.