December 20, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


RIGHT WING CONTEMPT FOR WORKING PEOPLE

According to right-wingers, we of the working class aren't "achievers." We who do the drudge jobs, the dangerous jobs, the dirty and smelly jobs are just there to be squeezed for the last cent of profit while the "achievers" put their profits in the bank and complain about any concessions to workers. In California it has been increasingly difficult to even file for unemployment. When you call to file you get a phone tree message that they're just too darned busy to take your call and they hang up on you. I have a friend who was laid off and has tried for two weeks to get through. It's disgraceful. I'm hopeful, like Bob Herbert in this column, that the Obama administration will bring positive changes for working people. This column is at www.nytimes.com:

Ordinary workers have suffered. It took years to get a lousy little boost in the minimum wage for the working poor. Attempts to expand health insurance coverage were fought almost to a standstill. Guaranteed pensions vanished. And the maniacs who set fire to the economy with their incendiary financial instruments (yet another form of voodoo) were hot to privatize Social Security.

As Andy Stern, president of the huge Service Employees International Union, told me on Friday: “We’ve had a 25-year experience with market-worshipping, deregulating, privatizing, trickle-down policies, and it has ended us up with the greatest economy on earth staggering, and with the greatest amount of inequality since the Great Depression.”

The contempt for workers over this long period has hardly been hidden. Until Mr. Bush was forced by circumstances to tap the TARP program for the auto industry loans (small potatoes compared with the gargantuan Wall Street bailouts), the administration had gone out of its way to keep the program’s hundreds of billions of dollars reserved for the elites of the financial services industry and their associates.