February 27, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

LEARNING LABOR HISTORY

In the United States there is a tremendous bias toward big business and capitalists. You have major attention focused on the stock market every day, but you seldom hear stories about unions or labor issues. Capitalists from Rockefeller to Mellon to Bill Gates get reverential attention, and great labor leaders get negative or no attention at all. We're sold a fantasy in this country that if you work hard and get educated you can be wealthy. It doesn't happen for most of us. Most of us are at the mercy of business our entire working lives. No matter how well you do your job, no matter how dutiful you are, you can be unemployed in a heartbeat. Working people need to get educated about the reality of being a member of the working class in the United States. This article by Charles Sullivan is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

The American worker, like the chattel slave before him, is kept in a state of perpetual ignorance by the Plutocracy for fear that he/she might awaken and rebel. Rebellion was the greatest fear that haunted the dreams of the plantation owners, and the uprisings led by Nat Turner and John Brown continues to trouble the dreams of the ruling clique, which explains why we are under constant surveillance by the government. They are looking for signs of trouble, the tell-tale smoke of social upheaval born of organization.

Students of American history, especially labor history, cannot help but come to the realization that we have been had, sold a defective bill of goods that can never work for us or the rest of the world.

The American dream is a myth that was fabricated in the corporate board rooms of America and perpetuated in the corporate media. Ninety-five percent of the people will never have pie in the sky, no matter how long and hard they work. A life of ease is something that is reserved for the privileged few who do not work and produce nothing. The myth was created to keep the workers striving, and to keep the rabble in line. It is a myth with the power of a paradigm and it has been extremely effective as a method of control and motivation.

January 09, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

TIME TO REPRESENT WORKING PEOPLE

Since the early 1970's the working class in the United States has been hammered by the economic policies of the federal government. Right-wingers have often screeched about "class warfare" and offer up statistics about the percentage of taxes paid by the rich. You would think, from their rhetoric, that the rest of us are just getting a free ride on taxes and sailing merrily along. Instead, we've seen a growing economic gulf between the very rich and everyone else. Despite rising productivity, most working people aren't getting ahead. The social contract has been thrown overboard and left to drown. It's time for the Democratic party to represent its core constituency, working people, and push policies that will benefit the vast majority of us who work for wages. This article by Bob Burnett is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

For the past six years, the ultra-conservative Bush Administration waged war on America's working families. Monday's New York Times provided fresh evidence of this: Tax Cuts Offer Most For Very Rich reported what most of us already knew: "Families earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply than any group in the country as a result of President Bush's tax cuts." Op-Ed columnist Bob Herbert noted that in 2006, "the top five Wall Street firms (Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley) were expected to award an estimated $36 billion to $44 billion worth of bonuses to their 173,000 employees." Herbert reported these bonuses - for one year - overwhelmingly exceeded the pay increases received by America's 93 million production and nonsupervisory workers for the last six years. The rich have benefited from the policies and ethics of the Bush Administration; everyone else has gotten the shaft.

Samuel Coleridge's Ancient Mariner famously lamented: "Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink." America's workers are in a comparable situation: all around them are indications of prosperity, yet it's not available to them. For twenty-five years, conservatives promised that a market stimulated by Federal tax-cuts would take care of America's problems: "A rising tide would lift all boats." Yet, the conservative tide lifted only the yachts of the rich.